Adobe has announced that it has purchased voice application platform, Sayspring Inc., which allows customers to develop voice interfaces for Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa without vast programming skills. The company, however, did not mention how much it paid to acquire the five-employee startup which was founded in 2016, though it added that Adobe had been testing voice interfaces on its range of product offerings over the past couple of years and the acquisition of Sayspring marks another step moving forward.
The entire New-York based Sayspring team officially joined Adobe last Tuesday, April 17, and the startup’s technology has since been migrated to the computer software giant’s product portfolio. It remains unclear, though, what Adobe plans next after the Sayspring acquisition, stating only that it will reveal further details about its plans for voice solutions in the future. Adobe added that Sayspring customers will still be able to gain access to the voice app platform following the completion of the acquisition. Sayspring previously developed a public version of its audio conversion tool, which used to be an internal solution for the company as part of its tasks to encode audio for voice applications. However, the Voicegram application used to record and share Sayspring conversation is no longer available for use. There’s good news though, as Mark Webster, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Sayspring, announced in a blog post that the service has removed its paid plans meanwhile to let all Sayspring customers use the platform’s premium features with no charge. However, Webster added that customers will be needing to request an invite, which will be distributed on a rolling basis, in order to access the platform.
It is, perhaps, worth pointing out that Adobe kicked off its work to integrate voice solutions into a number of its software products like Photoshop and Marketing Cloud after the company unveiled Sensei, its main artificial intelligence (AI) platform. The Sensei solution has also been used in other areas such as advanced image processing, having been applied to Adobe Scan, the company’s scanning app for Android launched last year with text recognition capabilities. The app is designed to let users scan documents anywhere using their smartphone or tablet and then convert those images into PDF documents, which can be shared or stored in the user’s Adobe Cloud account.