Redmond purchases Semantic Machines Inc.

May 21, 2018 11:32 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft has just announced that it purchased Semantic Machines Inc., a company focused on building conversational AI and that should help the company makes its bots act more like a human being.

The Redmond-based software giant is deeply involved in the world of artificial intelligence, and with products likes bots and Cortana, the company is trying to provide customers with the necessary ways of interacting with technology in a more effective manner.

Semantic Machines will play an essential role in this regard, as the company is building machine learning technology that will help improve user experience with products like Cortana and social chatbot Xiaolce, which according to its own statistics, has already reached 30 billion conversations in countries such as China, Japan, and the United States.

“With XiaoIce and Cortana, we’ve made breakthroughs in speech recognition and more recently become the first to add full-duplex voice sense to a conversational AI system, allowing people to carry on a conversation naturally,” Microsoft explains.

Bots acting more like humans

Microsoft will open a conversational AI center of excellence in Berkeley to set the foundation of the collaboration between the two firms. The top researchers working for Semantic Machines will join Microsoft, including former Apple chief speech Larry Gillick.

Microsoft says there are more than 1 million developers already using its Cognitive Services and 300,000 developers that embraced the Azure Bot Service, so this new acquisition should help indeed make computing more conversational in a way that makes it feel more like interacting with a human being.

“With the acquisition of Semantic Machines, we will establish a conversational AI center of excellence in Berkeley to push forward the boundaries of what is possible in language interfaces,” the firm continued.

Cortana, which is one of the technologies spearheading Microsoft’s AI push, is currently available on the company’s top platforms, including Windows, while also being offered to non-Windows users on iOS and Android.