Microsoft buys Wand Labs to boost its chatbot technology

New Delhi: Microsoft is digging deeper into messaging technology with its latest acquisition of a Sillicon valley based start-up company Wand Labs.

The California based software firm Wand Labs was founded in 2013 by an IIT alumnus Vishal Sharma.

With this deal the technology giant is planning to strengthen its position in the emerging era of combining the power of human language with the advanced machine language, as per Live Mint reports.

The total sum as well as the terms of deal were not made public.

"This acquisition accelerates our vision and strategy for Conversation as a Platform, which Satya Nadella introduced at our 'Build 2016' conference in March," said David Ku, Corporate Vice President, Information Platform Group (Microsoft) in a blog post.

The move builds on and extends the power of the Bing, Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and Windows platforms to empower developers everywhere. 

The Wand team's expertise around semantic ontologies, services mapping, third-party developer integration and conversational interfaces make them a great fit to join the Bing engineering and platform team, especially with the work we're doing in the area of intelligent agents and chat bots, Ku noted.

According to Microsoft, Vishal is a unique talent and a well-respected thought leader in this area.
"We are confident that he and his team can make significant contributions to our innovation of Bing intelligence in this new era of Conversation as a Platform. I am excited to welcome Vishal and the Wand Labs team to Microsoft," Ku added.

(With ANI inputs)