Google Buys Wavii For $30 Million: Apple Outbid For News Summarization App, Could Build Superior Siri For Google Now

Wavii, a Seattle-based startup described as trying to "make Facebook out of Google,” will soon be moving to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. TechCrunch reported Tuesday that the search giant acquired Wavii for more than $30 million, according to “a legitimate source.”

Wavii is an app that aims to improve how people consume news by boiling down complex stories into sentences of just a few words. The website describes the product as “a better way to consume the mountains of information being created on the Web, and find what you actually care about or, to let it find you.”

The 25-person Wavii team will join Google’s Knowledge Graph division, which will benefit from Wavii’s natural-language programs and disambiguation technologies. It’s expected that it will also be used to further contextualize the information Google currently displays to the right of search results. These same technologies could be used across several Google platforms, such as Glass, News and Now.

Apple was also bidding for Wavii, hoping to integrate the technology into Siri, Apple's voice-activated personal assistant app. With Google winning the bid, Google Now could use Wavii to create a more advanced Siri that is “aware” of important news stories.

The acquisition comes just weeks after Yahoo acquired Summly, a news reader and Wavii’s primary competitor, for a similar amount.

Follow Ryan W. Neal on Twitter