Google Acquires Wavii, Shuts Down Natural Language Processing Platform

Wavii on Friday confirmed earlier rumors that it has been acquired by Google.

On its website, Wavii acknowledged the buyout and revealed that it would be shutting down its own natural-language processing projects in order to focus on the same type of technology with the team at Google.

Wavii uses reports to develop newsfeed summaries via natural language processing. The company’s technology is able to use summary technology to determine the important parts of a story to display.

The tech firm technology in many ways mimics what Yahoo acquisition Summly accomplishes. Last month, Yahoo paid $30 million to acquire Summly. It is believed that Google paid about the same price for its acquisition of Wavii. According to one report, Google engaged in a bidding war with Apple when attempting to purchase the natural language processor.

The Wavii team is expected to help its technology integrate with Google News, Google Now, and various other applications.

Google was attempting to use Facebook social graph results for its news stories. This new acquisition could allow the company to focus on the same type of social graph output while potentially shifting towards Google+ integration.

It is believed that the staff from Wavii will make the move from Seattle to the Bay Area where they will work with Google’s Knowledge Graph division.

Do you think Wavii will help Google further its efforts towards perfecting its own natural language processing algorithms?