Microsoft has acquired Wand Labs, which has been developing iOS messaging apps since it was founded in 2013. Microsoft says the technology developed by Wand Labs will be used in the company's effort to help create AI messaging bots.
Microsoft went public in its efforts to build artificial intelligence bots at Build 2016 earlier this year. In a blog post on the Wand Labs acquisition, the company said:
Wand Labs' technology and talent will strengthen our position in the emerging era of conversational intelligence, where we bring together the power of human language with advanced machine intelligence — connecting people to knowledge, information, services and other people in more relevant and natural ways. It builds on and extends the power of the Bing, Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and Windows platforms to empower developers everywhere.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.
The specific financial terms of the Wand Labs purchase was not disclosed.
