Google Acquires Neural Network Startup DNNresearch To Boost Voice Search

It's not rare for Google to snatch up promising startups, and today's acquisition deal is no different. The search giant has acquired neural network startup DNNresearch in order to bolster their search engine even more with improved voice recognition, text search, and even image search. The financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.

The startup was incorporated just last year, and was founded by professor Geoffrey Hinton and two of his grad students, Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever, at the University of Toronto. Hinton is actually world-renowned for his work with neural networks, and the research done by the startup has "profound implications for areas such as speech recognition, computer vision and language understanding."

Google's search engine is already an impressive specimen, but it seems the company still wants to improve it in some areas, and that's where the research conducted by the folks at DNNresearch comes into play. Google hopes that the acquisition will push them in the right direction as far as voice recognition and improved search functionality.

The University of Toronto said that both Krizhevsky and Sutskever will be transfered to Google, and professor Hinton will split his time between working at Google and conducting research at the university. Hinton will work out of Google's Toronto offices, as well as at Google headquarters in Mountain View sometimes.

[via Engadget]