In their second acquisition of the week, this one with a much less expensive price tag compared to their LinkedIn purchase, Microsoft has picked up Wand Labs to bolster their Conversation as a Platform plans.
At BUILD2016 earlier this year Microsoft's Satya Nadella unveiled the companies new efforts to focus on intelligent platforms that includes bots that would enagage a customer through chat conversations in a program they have labeled Conversation as a Platform.
Specifically, Wand Labs will join the Bing team with their very unique skills and technologies:
"The Wand team’s expertise around semantic ontologies, services mapping, third-party developer integration and conversational interfaces make them a great fit to join the Bing engineering and platform team, especially with the work we’re doing in the area of intelligent agents and chat bots."
Microsoft feels that Wand Labs brings in the technology that will further build upon the work the Redmond company is already doing in machine learning and natural language interfaces. Ultimately this technology will improve the capabilities of Bing, Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and the Windows platform.
I have no doubt that Cortana will benefit from this infusion of technology as well.
Wand Labs founder and CEO, Vishal Sharma, confirms over on the companies website that their current service will be shutting down although no timeline is provided.
Sharma states that Wand Labs and Microsoft share similar visions of the intelligent platform's future:
"I’m proud of the work my team has done and what we’ve already accomplished in this emerging space – and I’m delighted to be joining a company that shares our passion and enthusiasm for this new era where conversation is the central focus. Making experiences for customers more seamless by harnessing human language is a powerful vision and one that motivates me and my team."
Information about the timeline for finalizing this purchase or the agreed sale price has not been made public by either company.
But, wait...there's probably more so be sure to follow me on Twitter and Google+.
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