Microsoft buys AI company to make virtual assistant sound more human-like

Where Google is showing off its human-like virtual assistant, Microsoft decided to take the same approach too as it has acquired an AI company to make sound of bots and assistants more natural and human-like.

Microsoft has acquired AI Startup Semantic Machines to make intelligent assistants such as its Cortana and chatbots to sound and respond more like humans. This acquisition is likely to boost Microsoft’s digital assistant Cortana and its Azure Bot Service that is used by 300,000 developers.

Microsoft AI & Research chief technology officer David Ku said in a blog post, “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.”

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As The Verge explains, Semantic Machines, a Berkeley-based company founded in 2014, makes use of machine learning for making bots to respond in more natural ways. The company is led by UC Berkeley professor Dan Klein and former Apple chief speech scientists Larry Gillick.

In its blog post, Microsoft wrote, “Combining Semantic Machines’ technology with Microsoft’s own AI advances, we aim to deliver powerful, natural and more productive user experiences that will take conversational computing to a new level.”

As per Daily Mail, the company didn’t reveal how much it paid for the acquisition, but said that the AI company would bring a ‘revolutionary new approach to building conversational AI’.

Microsoft also talked about the need for AI assistants and chatbots to not only respond to voice queries, but also to understand them and participate in conversation. “For rich and effective communication, intelligent assistants need to be able to have a natural dialogue instead of just responding to commands. We call this ‘conversational AI’,” said Ku.

Moreover, another tech giant Google is also working on similar technology of human-sounding AI. It even showed off its Google Duplex earlier this month, a feature of Google’s virtual Assistant that responds in more human-like ways.