• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, January 6, 2015

Facebook just made its first purchase of the New Year, and it signals an interest in voice-activated services. For an undisclosed sum, the social giant is now the proud parent of Wit.ai — a 2-year old start-up that specializes in natural language-powered apps.

Wit.ai boasts a network of more than 6,000 participating developers, who have so far build hundreds of voice-activated app and devices, by its own estimate.

“Facebook’s mission is to connect everyone and build amazing experiences for the over 1.3 billion people on the platform,” Wit.ai’s small management team explain in a blog post. “Technology that understands natural language is a big part of that, and we think we can help.”

Though not always successful, Facebook has long sought to curry favor with the developer community. This past summer, for example, the company launched FbStart -- a program that provides mobile start-ups with a set of free tools and services for app development.

Better apps — and better ties with the developer community — are critical to the success of Facebook’s mobile-first focus. In the third quarter, mobile advertising made up 66% of Facebook’s total advertising of $2.96 billion — up from 49% a year ago — and 62% in the prior quarter.

The mobile surge partly reflected the popularity of the company’s app-install ads, and the launch of its Audience Network in April, which extended ad-serving and targeting to third-party mobile apps.

Mobile monthly active users on Facebook grew 29% to 1.12 billion as of September 30, while mobile daily users were up 39% to 703 million. Those rates easily outpaced overall growth of 14% in monthly active users to 1.35 billion, with a 19% increase in daily users to 864 million.

Facebook's share of the $36.5 billion worldwide mobile ad spending is expected to reach 20.4% this year — up from 16.5% in 2013, according to eMarketer.

Wit.ai’s platform’s is expected to remain open, and become free for new and existing developers.