The acquisition is also in line with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s introduction of a new concept at this year’s Build 2016: Conversation as a Platform, which is explained as combining human language and machine intelligence to connect people to information, services and others in more natural ways.
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“The goal being to leverage mobile scale, natural language capabilities and third-party services to enable users to easily access and share any authorized service or device”, said Wand founder and CEO Vishal Sharma.
Although it’s not mentioned in either Microsoft’s blog post or the accompanying post from Wand Labs’ Sharma, this seems to be the kind of tech that will fit in nicely with how Microsoft is developing new services like Cortana, Microsoft’s intelligent assistant app that you can use to pick up information and trigger actions way of voice requests and commands.
According to a note on Wand’s web site, Wand will be shutting down its existing service.
Ku said the Wand team will be part of Microsoft’s Bing engineering team, working on chat bots.
Numerous tech industry’s biggest players are now working to address the chatbot trend, but few are investing more into the effort than Microsoft.
There is no information on what the terms of the deal were.
Word on the street indicates that Microsoft has acquired wand Labs.
This purchase marks Redmond’s latest effort to improve its conversation-as-a-platform strategy. Take for example Facebook has introduced chatbots to its Messenger, which will apparently rely on human language to communicate the customer’s needs.
Microsoft representatives say that the acquisition will bring valuable contributions to Bing intelligence and help the company join the “Conversation as a Platform” era.
Wand Labs has already withdrawn its apps from the Google Play and Apple App store, and there is no word on whether the acquisition will result in any redundancies.
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Nonetheless, Microsoft which spent $26.2 billion, to buy LinkedIn has not disclosed how much it will pay on the purchase of Wand Labs. In any case, it has had profound experience with semantics, messaging and authority all which are handy in the areas of intelligent agents and cognitive services.
