Yahoo Bought A Company That Lets You Talk To Computers As If They Were Humans
SkyPhrase, a natural language technology startup founded by Rensselaer professor Nick Cassimatis and two of his students, is trying to help people communicate with technology using the same language that they use in normal, every day situations.
SkyPhrase runs intelligent searches within Gmail and Twitter (for example, allowing you to search not only for "tweets from jillianiles" but something like "tweets from jillianiles with pictures") and was extending its capabilities to product and flight searches last year, according to a Forbes piece about the company.
Neither company revealed the terms of the deal, but SkyPhrase, which converted its website into a press release, made the following statement:
TechCrunch predicts that Yahoo could use SkyPhrase's technology to advance its fantasy sports investment. Regardless of the intended use of SkyPhrase technology, by focusing on improving results for conversational queries overall, Yahoo is making its content delivery more mobile friendly. Check out some of the other companies that Yahoo has recently snapped up>>