Facebook has made their first official acquisition of the year 2015 by buying out Wit.ai, opening up the possibility of adding a voice recognition feature to its social media site.

The social network giant bought out the likes of Oculus VR, WhatsApp, and Onavo in 2014, and is now greeting the new year with Wit.ai, an 18-month old startup company based in Palo Alto.

The speech tech company announced the acquisition on its official site, a deal which was finalized on Monday for an undisclosed amount.

"The most interesting journeys involve unexpected surprises," the announcement read, "Wit.ai is joining Facebook!"

"It is an incredibly acceleration in the execution of our vision. Facebook has the resources and talent to help us take the next step," the Wit.ai team wrote.

They added that the social media company understands that "natural language" is a big part of connecting people, something that Wit.ai also believes in.

The Wit.ai team announced that the platform will remain open and still remain free for use for interested parties.

Facebook also confirmed the acquisition and commented, "Wit.ai has built an incredible yet simple natural language processing API that has helped developers turn speech and text into actionable data. We're excited to have them onboard."

An analyst claimed that the deal could indicate Facebook's move into developing voice messaging or voice control.

Pamela Clark-Dickson, an analyst from consultancy firm Ovum, stated that numerous messaging companies were trying to connect messaging apps to devices. Facebook has the advantage over other companies thanks to extensive research and more than a billion users.

"You can connect them to multiple devices, that becomes a very powerful offering," she added, "Wit.ai also has the messenger agents and you could see those being incorporated into Facebook."

However when approached for a comment, a representative from Facebook declined to state details on its plans for the Wit.ai team and its speech recognition technology.