The Twitter (News - Alert) IPO was a great success and the company was trading at $42.90 with a market cap of $20.28 billion, while Facebook, a more established company, is at $46.20. Only time will tell if Twitter can live up to the hype, but Facebook is making steady progress by monetizing the largest pool of users of any organization in the world. During Q3 earnings call, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (News - Alert) publicized the company's investment in an artificial intelligence unit and the acquisition of Mobile Technologies, a speech recognition and machine translation company.
The AI unit is to find solutions for taking advantage of the company's 1.2 trillion searchable posts it has at its disposal. Analyzing this data and finding ways to monetize it will undoubtedly create multiple sources of revenue for the company.
The acquisition of Mobile Technologies is a trend in IT among all major players to incorporate the best speech recognition technology in the devices we use today. This market is slated to grow at an extremely fast rate and investors such as Carl Icahn have been making a play in the most successful organization in this sector. Icahn has a 16.9 percent share and seats on the board of Nuance (News - Alert), one of the most recognized speech recognition technology developers in the world.
Speech recognition technology is an important asset because smartphones and tablets will be relying on this technology more than ever. While the keyboard has served its purpose, its days are numbered and it is only a matter of time before speech recognition becomes the best way to input data on the computing devices we use.
The combination of AI and speech recognition is a brilliant move by Facebook (News - Alert). While speech recognition technology by itself has made incredible gains, combining the technology with an intuitive platform capable of searching not only the database archived in Facebook, but the whole of the Internet, it will give the company a way to compete with Google (News - Alert) in the search field.
"We also announced the acquisition of Mobile Technologies, a speech recognition and machine translation company that will help expand our work in the field beyond just photo recognition to voice,” said Zuckerberg. “Over time, I think it is going to be possible to build services that are much more natural to interact with and can help in solving many more problems than any existing technologies today. I am excited that we are working on this problem and I am looking forward to doing a lot more here."
Edited by Rory J. Thompson