Yap, Can Amazon Take on Siri by Acquiring You?

Amazon acquired a voice recognition company called Yap this week and the tech press is abuzz with speculation that the online retail giant plans to add voice-to-text capabilities to a future version of its Kindle Fire tablet to better compete against Apple's Siri technology for its own mobile devices.

The deal was spotted by Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic Wednesday in an SEC filing for a merger of Yap and Dion Acquisition Sub,Belstaff Giubbotti apparently a shell corporation that has an address on Amazon's Seattle campus.

Siri, the most talked-about (and to) addition to Apple's next-generation iPhone 4S smartphone, has laid down a gauntlet of sorts for Apple rivals to come up with their own voice-responsive personal assistants. Google, Apple's chief rival in the mobile operating system market,Moncler Outlet has improved the speech recognition in its Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich OS, set to appear in smartphones and tablets before the year is out.

Apple hasn't included Siri in an iPad, though it likely will in the iPad 3. Amazon, of course, hasn't even released its first tablet yet. The Kindle Fire is riding a wave of buzz, propelled by an attractive $199 sticker price and Amazon's content and services clout,Moncler Piumini but it won't actually be made available until next Tuesday.

But there has been plenty of speculation that the 7-inch Kindle Fire is just the starting point on an ambitious Amazon tablet roadmap. Various sources have Amazon following up the Fire with either a 9-inch device or a 10-inch model, probably in 2012,Tod's and possibly running Android 4.0. Could the company squeeze whatever Yap serves up onto those rumored future tablets?

As mentioned, Ice Cream Sandwich has beefed up Android's speech recognition and the updated OS now features continuous, real-time speech-to-text dictation. Amazon has shown with the Kindle Fire that it's perfectly willing to take what Android gives it and tweak the heck out of the OS to fit its own needs.

At this point, it would probably help to know what Yap does, exactly.

The startup's "first and only branded consumer product, Yap Voicemail, was a Google-Voice-like transcription app available for iOS and Android," according to Justin Ruckman of the Charlotte, N.C.-based CLTBlog, who is acquainted with brothers Igor and Victor Jablokov, who founded the company in 2006.

Ruckman said he used Yap Voicemail for more than a year and was "surprised last month when I received a notice that the service was to be discontinued, effective in only a matter of days."

The Jablokovs landed $8 million in funding in 2007 and 2008, but Yap never managed to get its product out of private beta, according to Ruckman. Igor Jablokov did manage to get some ink in The New York Times around the time of Yap's Series A funding round, however, telling the newspaper that he and his brother were inspired to start the company to get their kid sister to stop text-messaging in the car.

So what do others say about Yap? Madrigal dug up this quote from Paul Grim, general partner at SunBridge Partners, the Charlotte VC that led Yap's 2008 round of funding:

"Yap is truly a leader in freeform speech recognition and driving innovation in the mobile user experience. It is increasingly clear that the fastest, easiest, and safest way to interact with services on a mobile device is using your voice, and Yap makes this both possible and intuitive."

Online and by Paper Airplane, Donations Pour In to Chinese Dissident

Ai Weiwei on Tuesday. He has received more than $550,000 to pay a $2.4 million tax bill.

BEIJING — In the days since the Chinese government delivered a punitive $2.4 million tax bill to the artist Ai Weiwei, thousands of people have responded by donating money in a gesture that is at once benevolent and subversive.
More than 20,000 people have together contributed at least $550,000 since Tuesday, when tax officials gave Mr. Ai 15 days to come up with an amount that was more than three times the sum he was accused of evading in taxes.Belstaff　

“It’s surprising; it has really changed my perspective on people,” he said in a telephone interview on Sunday, describing how scores of supporters, some of whom traveled from distant cities, have been delivering cash to his home.

One of China’s best known artists and a voluble government critic, Mr. Ai was detained in April and held for 81 days at an undisclosed location, ostensibly on tax evasion charges, according to the state-run news media. Mr. Ai insists his prosecution is politically motivated.Expedition Parka　

During his confinement, he said his questioners were only interested in discussing his activism, particularly his role in the so-called Jasmine Revolution, the call for pro-democracy protests inspired by events in the Arab world. Mr. Ai said he was not involved in organizing the protests, which were effectively stymied by the Chinese authorities.

Since his release in June, Mr. Ai, 54, has kept a low profile, one of the conditions of his bail. But the imposed silence ill-suited the artist, who has increasingly bridled against the restrictions, among them a prohibition against talking to the news media or communicating publicly through Weibo, China’s Twitter-like microblogging service.Giacca Moto　

Since the amount of his fine became public on Tuesday, Mr. Ai appears to have shed any reluctance to speak out and has criticized the tax penalty as an act of naked retribution for his critiques against the governing Communist Party.

The donations began pouring in on Thursday, many of them delivered electronically and accompanied by politically tinged comments. “You helped them to design the Bird’s Nest, but they sent you into a bird cage,” said one donor, referring to Mr. Ai’s role in designing the Olympic stadium in Beijing. “You charged them fees, but now they fine you more than hundreds of times that in blood and sweat.”

Some contributions have been small — symbolic, fractional sums of the total — while others have totaled thousands of dollars. Mr. Ai said one businessman offered him 1 million renminbi, about $157,000, but he turned it down, saying he preferred to receive smaller sums. Mr. Ai has insisted on describing the money as loans that he will repay.

On Sunday, after his Weibo account was disabled, dozens of people began arriving at the gate of Mr. Ai’s studio on the outskirts of the capital. He said a number of people had folded 100-renminbi notes into airplanes and tossed them over the walls of his compound.

“Over the past three years, during all the efforts I’ve made, sometimes I felt like I was crying alone in a dark tunnel,” he said. “But now people have a way to express their true feelings. This is a really, really beautiful event.”