Amazon acquires voice technology on the quiet

08:03 PM Nov 11, 2011
SEATTLE - It seems Amazon is dead set on competing with Apple on the tablet arena.

The quiet bid to buy Yap, a company specialising in voice-recognition technology, has echoed in tech news sites around the globe.

According to IT news site Mashable, Yap technically merged with a subsidiary called Dion Acquisition in September, according to SEC (The United States Securities and Exchange Commission) filings.

This would not have been news if an eagle-eyed tech blogger, based in Yap's hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina, had not noticed that the address listed for the subsidiary was an Amazon building in Seattle.

Neither Yap nor Amazon have confirmed the deal.

At current technology, Yap and Siri are not of the same league. While Yap is more of a transcription software (to convert your phone calls into text), Yap's founders suggested their intellectual property went way beyond that, and that it was a potential competitor to the do-it-all voice recognition app Vlingo, said Mashable.

Vlingo is a free virtual assistant app to help you text, dial and search via voice-operation.

Tech news sites are a-twitter about the possibility of Amazon acquiring Siri-like capability for its Kindle range of tablets - led by the Android-powered Kindle Fire.

If Amazon achieves strong voice-recognition capability, it would be able to provide hands-free access to all your media such as finding songs, playing and pausing movies, even turning the pages of a book.

While it is not clear what Amazon is planning with Yap, its possibilities are endless with tech news pnosker.com even going as far as suggesting Amazon could possible be thinking of an Amazon phone.

There are multitudes of suggestions on what the news means, including one that says that Dion Acquisition may just be renting a spare room in Amazon. AGENCIES