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Google Acquires Messaging App Emu and Business Video Maker Directr

Google Acquires Messaging App Emu and Business Video Maker Directr

By Hitesh Arora | Updated: 7 August 2014 19:22 IST

Google has acquired an instant messaging application startup called Emu. The company also acquired Directr, a business video maker.

The Emu team made the announcement on its website on Wednesday, "As of August 25, 2014, we'll be shutting down the Emu app. It will no longer be available in the App Store, and existing users won't be able to send, receive, or download messages."

The instant messaging app Emu comes with a 'built-in assistant'. Makers of the app describe themselves as "alumni of Siri, Apple, Google and Yahoo." Gummi Hafsteinsson, who co-founded Emu in 2012, formerly worked as Vice President of Product for Apple's Siri and a Senior Product Manager at Google, while the other partner, Dave Feldman, worked at AOL, Yahoo and TechCrunch. Feldman is known for its contribution in designing the Yahoo Messenger app for iOS and Windows Phone platforms.

The Emu messenger app made its debut on Android in October last year, while the Emu for iPhone app came in April this year.

Notably, Emu uses artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing to help it understand the content and context of messages. It seems that Google with this acquisition has plans to improve upon its Google Now virtual assistant to compete with rivals like Cortana and Siri.

While Microsoft's Cortana also boasts its human-like ability to learn and understand natural language commands, the Redmond giant is still making more improvements in a bi-monthly update cycle, and may also bring Cortana to Android and iOS devices.

Apple reportedly is also upgrading Siri to a smarter neural network design, and is said to be hiring "Siri Language Engineers" to make its voice-based virtual assistant support 13 new languages, namely Arabic, Australian English, Brazilian Portuguese, British English, Cantonese, Danish, Dutch, Japanese, Norwegian, Swedish, Thai, Turkish and Russian.

In the meanwhile, Google's YouTube unit has acquired Directr, a mobile-video app startup. The Directr team made the announcement on its blog on Wednesday.

Our small band of scrappy film lovers set out 2 years ago to help regular folks make great video. Today, we are incredibly excited to take the next step on that journey and announce that we are joining the video ads team at YouTube... For now, everything you love about Directr is staying the same and we'll continue to focus on helping businesses create great video quickly and easily. One immediate bonus: Directr will soon be all free, all the time. Thanks, YouTube!

The Wall Street Journal describes Directr as a startup aimed at helping small businesses create promotional videos from the Directr app - which is available to iOS devices. From the Directr app, users could simply shoot, edit and upload video for some chargeable ($25 to $400) amount.

YouTube corroborated the acquisition with a small post on Google+, saying, "Directr is joining the YouTube ads team, where they'll help us make it easier for advertisers to create and upload awesome videos."

Exact financial terms of both acquisitions have not been disclosed by Google, Directr or Emu.

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