Api.ai is joining Google

I&#x27;m assuming Google doesn&#x27;t need any of the company&#x27;s business, and that it is being acquired for its talent.<p>So, my real question: how much, on average, does a founder get as part of one of these acquihires? And does s&#x2F;he actually, y&#x27;know, have to do any work after getting paid?

Congrats to them. I do find this sentence a bit awkward: &quot;It has been a long and fun journey. Since API.AI’s launch in 2014...&quot; I think the CEO referring to the total time into the company (including the Speaktoit phase), but it comes across badly - leaves me thinking &quot;You think 2 years is a long time???&quot; I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s what the CEO meant to say.

Does this signal a continued push for bots and conversational UX?<p>Where does the belief in the tech come from? Are there any examples of real success with this tech?<p>Bots can&#x27;t solve discovery in a novel way without big advances in NLP. There doesn&#x27;t seem to be a bridge from here to there where it makes sense as a user.<p>Is this just irrational exuberance?<p>I&#x27;d love to understand why microsoft&#x2F;google&#x2F;facebook are all continuing to bet big here.

Congratulations to the api.ai team. Unrelated to the acquisition directly, but fantastic logo placement. I can&#x27;t be the only person that looks for their color-changing sign every time I drive down the 101. Awesome advertising &#x2F; growth hack. :)

Tried API.ai a few months ago and was very unimpressed with the results (things were slow, expensive and not very powerful. Rebuilding the models was also broken at times). I am unsure why Google are acquiring them, especially given that they have DeepMind and TensorFlow teams.

This kind of text reads like something that is going to end up in <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com&#x2F;</a>

I wonder how engineers at Google feel about all this. I guess they feel they should be joining these startups instead of slogging at Google. They can just easily retire&#x2F;do their own thing if they are part of these acquihires.

With Firebase expanding to form an entire ecosystem of services, <i>and</i> being kept alive for a long time now, I have renewed hope that being acquihired by Google won&#x27;t just be the death knell - at least for this type of service.

That&#x27;s interesting they just bought apigee which does about the same thing?

Facebook acquired wit.ai in January 2015, and I wonder if this acquisition is Google&#x27;s quite belated response to that?

Another one of those services I wish I&#x27;d heard about before its acquisition. But at least this one does not appear to have been shut down on day one?

I&#x27;m actually excited for this. API.ai us a great set of tools to use.

I honestly don&#x27;t think this is a aquire-hire. It seems much more of an attempt to get access to additional data not made public from companies using api.ai, at the same time boosting Alphabets capabilities.

Of course they are, what else would they do; ~2 years old and already sold [1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Speaktoit#Api.ai" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Speaktoit#Api.ai</a>

not sure what google gains by doing this, hope google can leverage this and give its customer more AI-APIs, the more the merrier, especially better speech-APIs(similar to Alexa but more open)

Literally never heard of this company. Serious question: How can I find a company that is likely to get acquired by Google?

Congrats to the api.ai team.<p>I love when great companies do well.<p>I&#x27;m a happy customer (and wish I were also an investor, but I&#x27;m not).

Google acquired APIgee and now API.AI. Why Google is so interested in API&#x27;s now?

What they did? Yet another interface wrapper to Stanford Core NLP for over hyped chat bots?

&gt; It has been a long and fun journey.<p>Using the word &quot;journey&quot; is this context is rather... risky.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com</a>