Amazon Secretly Buys Voice Company

Is Amazon trying to dig deeper into gadget land? The company appears to have clandestinely purchased Yap, a company specializing in voice recognition technology. In a never-announced deal on Sept. 8, Yap was acquired by a company called Yarmuth Dion Inc. The merged company was then immediately renamed Yap. But CLT Blog noticed that, according to SEC filings, this new Yap has the same address as Amazon’s corporate headquarters in Seattle.

Speculation is swirling that Amazon means to produce a competitor for Apple’s Siri voice control technology. Yap’s only consumer product was an iPhone and Android app that converted voicemails into text, but All Things Digital reports that the company’s original goal when it was founded was to let people control their technology with voice commands. CLT says the one of the company’s founders also boasted that it had “IP in every iPhone and Android device.” (More Amazon stories.)