Continuing its expansion at roughly the same pace as the known universe, Facebook has just announced that they have acquired Mobile Technologies, the developer of Jibbigo, a universal translator app for Android and iOS.
According to an official announcement on Jibbigo’s website, and confirmed by Facebook’s own Tom Stocky, the sale is mostly a talent acquisition.
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. With this deal we will welcome some of the industry’s most talented people to our engineering teams 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. 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.
Facebook’s not saying much here about the future of Jibbigo’s apps (although they are still available as of writing on both Google Play and the iOS App Store), but it appears that they could use the team to add any number of features to Facebook, from better translation of foreign languages, to Siri-like voice recognition and transcription. How soon until we see something cool from Jibbigo baked into the official Facebook app?
