Software giant Microsoft has announced today that it acquired Semantic Machines. The acquisition of the AI start-up company was meant to bolster the company’s AI offerings. This includes the AI products like Cortana, the Azure Bot Service, and Microsoft Cognitive Services, among others.
Microsoft buys Semantic Machines
According to Microsoft, Semantic Machines has extensive experience in working speech synthesis, deep learning, and natural language processing. The company actually works creatively in producing creative AI.
They claim that their products aid machines “to communicate, collaborate, understand our goals, and accomplish tasks.” Now with Microsoft acquired Semantic Machines, you can expect that the company would help Microsoft compete with conversational computing initiatives.
This as Microsoft is competing for other computing initiatives from other big tech companies like Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google’s Assistant, and Samsung’s Bixby, among others. Also, the AI start-up company has also assembled a group of experts in the conversational AI arena.
This cadre of experts includes Larry Gillick, the former chief scientist for Siri at Apple and researchers UC Berkeley professor Dan Klein as well as Stanford University professor Percy Liang.
“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,” Microsoft AI and research CTO David Ku said in a blog post.
In case you don’t know, Semantic Machines was founded in August 2014. In the same year, investors poured in $8.5 million of funds to the company. It also received another $12.3 million in December 2015.
