Facebook acquires Mobile Technologies

Social media firm takes on speech recognition and machine translation technologies start-up

Social media network Facebook has announced that it has acquired speech recognition and machine translation technologies start-up Mobile Technologies.

The start-up developed the Jibbigo app, which allows users to select from more than 25 languages, record an audio note in that language or type in some text, and then get a translation on screen or read aloud by an automatic voice reader.

Facebook's Tom Stocky wrote in a blog post: "I'm excited to announce that we've agreed to acquire Mobile Technologies, a company with an amazing team that's behind some of the world's leading speech recognition and machine translation technology."

As part of the deal, the Mobile Technologies team will move to Facebook's engineering team in Menlo Park, California.

"It has always been our mission to make the world more open and connected. Although more than a billion people around the world already use Facebook every month, we are always looking for ways to help connect the rest of the world as well," Stocky said.

"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. We believe this acquisition is an investment in our long-term product roadmap as we continue towards our company's mission," he added.

The company could eventually use the technology to enable users who don't speak the same language to communicate through its Facebook Chat, or enable statuses, Facebook pages or profile pages to be written in one language and displayed in another.