Microsoft has acquired a veteran AI team, including the ex-chief speech scientist for Siri (MSFT)

Cortana

Microsoft has bought Semantic Machines, an artificial intelligence startup based in Berkeley, California.
The team includes a former chief speech scientist for Siri, Larry Gillick.
The acquisition will help Microsoft tackle "conversational AI" and make chatbots and digital assistants able to converse more naturally.
Microsoft will establish an AI research centre in Berkeley.

Microsoft has acquired an artificial intelligence startup, Semantic Machines, to bolster its efforts in "conversational AI" and potentially make its Cortana virtual assistant better at understanding natural language enquiries.

Microsoft didn't disclose how much it paid for Semantic Machines, but said it would open a new AI research centre in Semantic Machines' hometown of Berkeley.

Semantic Machines is made up of a number if AI veterans, and gives Microsoft access to some formidable talent. Larry Gillick is Semantic's chief technology officer and a former chief speech scientist for Apple's Siri. Microsoft also namechecked UC Berkeley professor Dan Klein and Stanford University professor Percy Liang.

Several Semantic staffers also worked at Nuance, the voice recognition company once powered Siri. Semantic's chief executive, Dan Roth, was cofounder of Voice Signal Technologies, which was acquired by Nuance in 2007.

Microsoft explained that most AI doesn't really understand much human communication, something that anyone who's put anything more than the simplest question to Siri will already know. "Most of today’s bots and intelligent assistants respond to simple commands and queries, such as giving a weather report, playing a song or sharing a reminder, but aren’t able to understand meaning or carry on conversations," Microsoft wrote in a company blog announcing the acquisition.

Semantic Machines' team and technology might fix that, by helping digital assistants like Cortana have a "natural dialogue."

"We call this 'conversational AI,'" Microsoft added.

Microsoft has been experimenting for some time in this space. Aside from Cortana, the company has dabbled in chatbots, though not always with great success. Its Chinese chatbot Xiaoice has millions of loyal followers who talk to it. But earlier chatbot experiments, such as Tay and Zo, spouted racist and anti-Microsoft messaging and had to be shut down.

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