In a bit of an unclear post, PullString announced today that it was going to be shuttering its chat bot support tool and focusing on speech based services online. This seems like a prudent move.

Over the past two years, there’s been a large consolidation and culling of natural language tool companies. Wit.AI was acquired by Facebook. API.AI was acquired by Google. Maluuba was acquired by Microsoft. Viv was acquired by Samsung. MindMeld, which also had an NLU tool, was acquired by Cisco.

Bots were going to be the be-all last year. Facebook had announced thousands of bots, WeChat had lots of bots, but in the end, the consumer interaction with bots just didn’t seem to take off.

By focusing on voice tools, PullString can keep itself competitive with Voicebots, Smartly, or others in the Skill / Action development space. Ultimately, more consolidation will happen here, maybe some of it through Google or Amazon.