First Amazon announced the Kindle Fire, which many seem to think is going to dent Apple’s iPad sales this holiday season. Now some say the digital retail giant plans to build a speech recognition interface to rival Apple’s Siri personal assistant technology. The speculation stems from the recent revelation that Amazon.com has quietly acquired speech-to-text software developer Yap, which was founded in 2006 by Igor Jablakov, who previously worked on speech recognition technologies at IBM.

Amazon bought Yap in September but did not make a public announcement. The Atlantic, however, uncovered an SEC filing that doesn’t even identify Amazon by name, but instead states that Yap merged with a company headquartered at the address of Amazon’s legal services team.

Apple’s Siri lets iPhone 4S users talk to their phone to send messages, schedule meetings, make phone calls, perform Web searches and more.

Read more at MSNBC ^[1].