Facebook Acquires QuickFire And Wit.ai

Facebook is starting the New Year with a series of acquisitions. Earlier this year it acquired Wit.ai, a speech recognition and natural language processing service. A rep for Facebook confirmed the deal in a statement to Mashable. “Wit.ai has built an incredible yet simple natural language processing API that has helped developers turn speech and text into actionable data. We’re excited to have them on board," the Facebook spokesperson said.

"It is an incredible acceleration in the execution of our vision. Facebook has the resources and talent to help us take the next step," the Wit.ai team said in a post about the acquisition. "The platform will remain open and become entirely free for everyone."

Facebook announced the acquisition of QuickFire Networks, a video infrastructure start-up to improve and expand the video experience on the site.

“Video is an essential part of the Facebook experience," a Facebook spokesperson said in an emailed statement. "We are excited to bring QuickFire Networks on board as we continue delivering a high quality video experience to the over 1.3 billion people who use Facebook.”

This move has come at a time when there is cut throat competition for the online video space with YouTube getting in more creative talent and Twitter expected to launch its own video product in the near future.

The terms of the deal have not been disclosed as yet.