After its huge announcement of LinkedIn acquisition plans a few days back for a mammoth $26.2, Microsoft has now acquired app developer Wand Labs, where it will be providing bots for a flair of natural language.
Wand Labs’ team will be added to Microsoft’s Bing team and will focus on artificial intelligence and online chat bots.
In a blog post by the company, it stated this deal as a part of its bigger strategy to develop the “conversation as a platform”.
It said, “I am pleased to announce that Microsoft has 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.”
Founded by Vishal Sharma in 2013, Wand Labs focuses on semantic ontologies, services mapping, third-party developer integration and conversational interfaces. The company’s messaging interface enables users to do fancy stuff like sharing songs to giving a friend the ability to control your smart devices.
Wand Labs is still pretty small and has just seven employees with less than $3 million under its funding vest. Hence, this deal would be a massive one for the company.
The deal also further pushes Microsoft’s increasing focus on a future that revolves around bots, agents, assistants, and other tools that can be controlled by typing or talking. Wand Labs’ technology will complement and strengthen Microsoft’s position in conversational intelligence and enable it to connect people in more natural ways.
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