Google Acquires Api.ai To Take On Facebook’s Plan To Lead The Chatbots Race

Google made an acquisition this week and it’s not Twitter like some have speculated but a company that provides a platform for developers to build chatbots. API.ai was recently acquired by Google for an undisclosed fee and is based in California. According to Scott Huffman who is the VP of Engineering at Google, API.ai has over 60,000 developers using its tools to build conversational apps for services like Facebook or Slack, the team messaging platform.

This underscores Google’s shift to chatbots to now take on Facebook which announced its own initiative back in April and since then, 34,000 developers have now built over 30,000 over six month period. This has now led to conclusions that the bot economy is now performing better than the mobile app did in its first six months. In terms of the number of developers committed to building both technologies, the bot has also outperformed the app. See full report here.

API.ai CEO Ilya Gelfenbeyn also confirmed this in a separate post saying “as we start this next chapter, we want to express how truly grateful we are to our customers, developers, partners, employees, advisors and investors. We can’t wait to continue working with you and could not have gotten to this point without your support.We cannot thank you enough.

We hope you are as excited as we are with what’s to come at Google and value your continued support.”

That’s it people, Google which launched Allo (based on chatbot primarily too) earlier, want to take this (chatbots) to a whole new level. Like the Mr. Huffman, said we’ll stay tuned for more.