Amazon Acquires 'Yap' in Order to Compete with Apple's Siri Voice App

[dgstorm]

A new report indicates that Amazon has acquired the voice recognition company, Yap. The industry speculation is that they bought Yap to have a Siri clone so they can compete, should Siri turn into a market leading function for smartphones of the future. Yap was founded by brothers Igor and Victor Jablokov, four years ago, with the intention "...to build technology that allowed people to interact with Web services using speech recognition." In 2007, the idea was a bit ahead of its time, because wireless services were not very fast, and very few people owned smartphones. Obviously, things have changed since then.

It'll be interesting to see if Amazon can pick up and run with Yap's ball to become competitive with Siri, and push the voice recognition technology even further. If you really think about it, Amazon's services would be another perfect match for voice-assisted search technology. You can almost see it... between Google storing and serving all global information, and Amazon doing the same for all global entertainment, one day we will have practically any question answered by simply asking it out loud. In our future we will no longer have to get information at the "touch of a button" because we won't even need the button.

Source: Kindle-FireForum via AllThingsD