The acquisition is just the latest in a spree of purchases by Yahoo under Marissa Mayer’s leadership and it suggests that Yahoo shares the same interest in understanding complex, colloquial input that major tech companies from Facebook to Google have ventured into.

The challenge for Yahoo will be see if they grow SkyPhrase to touch ore of their products. The race for NLP is on, the stakes are high and all of the big players, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon and Nuance are in a buying frenzy. Yahoo however is the one of that seems to be the best at leveraging the tech in products that reach consumers in the least amount of time.

The acquisition indicates Yahoo sees voice search as a thing of the future-an idea touted most recently by Google. The internet giant has been pushing its Google now voice search service over the last year, and it has even hinted that voice search is where internet browsing is headed. However Yahoo hasn’t specifically detailed what SkyPhrase will be doing under the Yahoo labs research firm.