Facebook's agreement to acquire Mobile Technologies was announced in a blog post by Facebook Product Management Director, Tom Stocky, who said voice technology was becoming more and more important.

"I'm excited to announce that we've agreed to acquire Mobile Technologies, a company with an amazing team that's behind some of the world's leading speech recognition and machine translation technology," Stocky wrote.

"Voice technology has become an increasingly important way for people to navigate mobile devices and the web, and this technology will help us evolve our products to match that evolution," the statement read.

Mobile Technologies was founded in 2001 and developed the Jibbigo mobile application for speech-to-speech language translation, widely used by travellers today.

The company said it was "excited to announce that Facebook has agreed to acquire Mobile Technologies and that once the deal has closed many of us will be joining the company at their headquarters in Menlo Park, California."

The news follows revelations that Facebook is nearing its IPO price, outperforming market and analyst expectations particularly in mobile.