Microsoft has acquired several firms with conversational AI expertise to enhance its profile and offer business solutions with better communication
Microsoft has announced that it has acquired Texas-based XOXCO, a company dealing with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and bot development. Lili Cheng, Corporate Vice President, Conversational AI at Microsoft, said that the acquisition was aimed at developing AI and integrating conversational experiences.
Conversational AI
Over the past years, business entities have been engaging with employees and customers with Conversational artificial intelligence. It simply means the increasing usage of messaging apps, speech-based assistants and chatbots to automate communication and create personalized customer experiences at scale. Organisations have been creating virtual assistants and reworking on customer interaction using conversational assistants that are believed to help in better communication and work. Gartner has predicted that conversational AI will be used by over 50 per cent of large, consumer-centric enterprises by 2020.
Microsoft acquisitions
Microsoft, over the past six months, has been buying several firms to boost its AI development. Some of these are Semantic Machines, Bonsai, Lobe and GitHub. The tech giant had acquired Bonsai mainly to combine machine teaching, reinforcement learning and simulation and bring down barriers to AI development. September and October 2018 saw the acquisitions of Lobe and GitHub. The former supports the application of deep learning and AI modules without writing codes while the latter is aimed at boosting bot development.
XOXCO portfolio
XOXCO’s portfolio spans across creation of Howdy, the first commercially available bot for Slack that helps in scheduling meetings and Botkit, a kit of development tools used by developers. Microsoft Bot Framework, available as a service in Azure and on GitHub, today supports over 360,000 developers.
