Facebook to gobble voice-recog outfit, not so chatty on price tag
Translate 'dumb f***s' into 'making the world more connected' ... bitch
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Facebook plans to buy speech recognition and translation app maker Mobile Technologies for an undisclosed sum.
The free-content ad-network said on Monday that it had agreed to acquire the outfit, adding that MT's "amazing team" is "behind some of the world's leading speech recognition and machine translation technology".
Once the deal completes, employees at Mobile Technologies will join Facebook's engineering crew in Menlo Park, California.
"Voice technology has become an increasingly important way for people to navigate mobile devices and the web, and this technology will help us evolve our products to match that evolution," said Facebook's product management director Tom Stocky in a blog post.
"We believe this acquisition is an investment in our long-term product roadmap as we continue towards our company's mission."
He noted that the social network's "mission" is the conceit often floated by boss Mark Zuckerberg: "to make the world more open and connected".
Back in 2004, when Zuck founded Facebook in his Harvard dorm, the flame-haired, sneaker-wearing billionaire famously described the people entering their details into the site as "dumb fucks".
Of course, Zuck's grown up now and has taken Facebook public. Surely no one would now label the over 1 billion people on his network as chumps for handing over so much personal data, would they? ®
