Yap Inc.

» see yapme.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Amazon bought Yap Inc. in September 2011 and said nothing about it. No press release went out and no blog post went up. When reporters asked, Amazon would not confirm it. The deal surfaced because a Charlotte blogger named Justin Ruckman read an SEC filing and noticed that a local speech company was merging into something called Dion Acquisition Sub, registered at an address inside Amazon's Seattle headquarters.

Yap had been founded in 2006 by Igor R. Jablokov with Victor R. Jablokov, in Charlotte, North Carolina. Igor came out of IBM. The company's platform was the Yap Speech Cloud, a fully cloud-based speech-to-text engine with no desktop component, which in 2010 was unusual enough that Microsoft was among its customers.

The consumer product was a voicemail transcription app for iPhone and Android. Your voicemail arrived as text you could read instead of a recording you had to dial into and sit through. That problem belonged to a particular place and decade: American carriers charged for minutes and routed everything through a voicemail system people openly dreaded. I grew up on prepaid Turkish lines where nobody left voicemail to begin with, so the thing Yap sold to consumers was solving something I had never experienced as a problem.

~ the case file ~

~ the quiet sale ~

The filing was dated 8 September 2011. All Things Digital confirmed the acquisition independently in November, and the press read it as Amazon building an answer to Siri, which Apple shipped the month after the Yap deal closed. The comparison flattered Yap. Its engine transcribed audio accurately and at scale, which is the unglamorous half of what an assistant needs and the half nobody writes headlines about.

The company's equity was put at $12 million. The purchase price was never published.

~ october 20 ~

The voicemail app stopped on 20 October 2011, six weeks after the filing and before most of its users knew who owned it. Speech Technology Magazine's December write-up used the word unceremoniously, which is accurate: no migration path existed and a Yap subscriber had nowhere to go.

What Amazon kept was the engine and the people. The Charlotte work went into a speech stack Amazon was assembling without telling anyone what it was for.

~ what it fed ~

The Echo was announced in November 2014, three years after the Yap app went dark, and Alexa was the reason to own one. English Wikipedia credits the Yap acquisition with helping develop the Alexa Voice Service and the Echo, and Bloomberg's 2016 account of how the Echo was built covers the same ground. A Charlotte Ledger piece is more careful about it, saying it is unclear exactly how much the Charlotte work shaped the device. Amazon shut Yap's only consumer product inside two months of buying it, and the thing that emerged on the far side answers to a name.

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