?EU?Wand Labs?EU? technology and talent will strengthen our position in the emerging era of conversational intelligence, where we bring together the power of human language with advanced machine intelligence -- connecting people to knowledge, information, services and other people in more relevant and natural ways,?EU? David Ku, corporate vice president of the Information Platform Group at Microsoft said in statement. ?EU?It builds on and extends the power of the Bing, Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and Windows platforms to empower developers everywhere.?EU?
Ku added that the Wand Labs team?EU?s expertise around semantic ontologies, services mapping, third-party developer integration, and conversational interfaces made it a particularly attractive acquisition to integrate with the Bing engineering and platform team, especially since Microsoft has been pursuing advances in intelligent agents and chat bots.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella unveiled the conversation-as-a-platform strategy earlier this year at Microsoft?EU?s 2016 Build Conference. The strategy refers to efforts by the company to make it easier for app developers to incorporate some of the intelligence capabilities of Bing available for chat bot developers through a new framework, he said. The ultimate goal is to help make chat bots and voice commands the central interfaces for a broad variety of apps, according to Nadella.
Wand Labs' mission is to ?EU?tear down app walls, integrate your services in chat and make them work together so you can do more with less taps," according to its Web site.
Microsoft did not say how much it spent on the startup,...