Microsoft acquires Wand Labs to boost chatbots, intelligence programs

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, who was on a India visit recently, had said his company was trying to teach computers the human language to make computing faster by using artificial intelligence assistants such as Cortana, a programme that runs on most Windows devices and gets tasks done by speech recognition.

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, who was on a India visit recently, had said his company was trying to teach computers the human language to make computing faster by using artificial intelligence assistants such as Cortana, a programme that runs on most Windows devices and gets tasks done by speech recognition.

Microsoft seems to be on an acquiring spree as the company on Friday said that it had acquired messaging app developer Wand Labs.

"This acquisition accelerates our vision and strategy for 'Conversation as a Platform', which Satya Nadella introduced at our Build 2016 conference in March," David Ku, corporate vice president at Information platform group divison at Mircosoft, said.

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, who was on a India visit recently, had said his company was trying to teach computers the human language to make computing faster by using artificial intelligence assistants such as Cortana, a programme that runs on most Windows devices and gets tasks done by speech recognition.

"We are going to bring in bots which will result in democratisation for developers who would look at reinventing apps for speech recognition via a virtual assistant that would make human lives easier," he had added.

Ku further justified the acquisition and 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."

Founded in 2013 by CEO Vishal Sharma, Wand Labs claimed that it has already been developing in areas specific to Conversation as a Platform. The team claims that its expertise revolves 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.