Alexia Tsotsis, in a post for TechCrunch:
Google has finally closed the deal on Wavii, a natural language processing startup, for a price that is more than $30 million, we’re hearing from a legitimate source. Both Apple and Google were competing for the Seattle-based startup, and Google eventually won.
If you're not familiar with Wavii, it is a startup that has produced some very cool natural language processing and machine learning technology that aggregates news and summarizes it in meaningful ways. Wavii has a blog post on its site that explains, in general, how its technology works. The short summary of it is that Wavii creates news feeds for news topics, so (for example) it can take information from different news sources such as "Kanye and Kim K Expecting" and "Kim Kardashian: Baby Bump" and aggregate and summarize that information into something such as "Kanye West and Kim Kardashian expecting a child". Perhaps the best part is that Wavii also maintains the original source links it used to generate the summarized information so users can dig into additional details.
Anyone who suffers from a deluge of articles about the same exact news topic will appreciate what Wavii can do for users. This acquisition is a good move for Google since it will help Google to add interesting features to its search technology as well as products such as Google Now.