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Saturday, July 31, 2021
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Microsoft Buys Wand Labs to Help it Develop Smarter Chat Bots

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Windows 10 Cortana Assistant After the $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn, Microsoft recently bought Wand Labs, a Foster City, Calif.-based startup focused on artificial intelligence and natural language. The firm has already some messaging apps in the making which are designed to act smarter than rival versions.

People familiar with the matter believe that the tech giant’s recent purchase is destined to help it develop “conversation as a platform,” as it has recently stated. Plus, Wand Labs engineers will team up with both Bing and platform developers to design smarter chat bots and agents.

Microsoft declined to unveil the price of the deal. We only know that the startup had collected about $3 million in funding prior to the purchase.

David Ku, who is part of the Information Platform Group at Microsoft, said that the startup will help the team gain a competitive edge in the growing field of conversational intelligence.

Ku explained that conversational intelligence is seeking new methods to make human-robot conversations as natural as they can get. In these efforts, natural language know-how and advanced technology play a key role.

Wand Labs had various ongoing projects such as mapping of services, semantic ontology, and third-party developer integration. The latter project is of great interest for Microsoft as its competitors are already working on similar programs which can integrate third party services within their own apps and services. It is the case with Facebook’s Messenger bots and Amazon’s Echo I-o-T platform.

Experts believe that Microsoft may use the technology to boost the functionality of its virtual assistant Cortana although neither the company nor Wand Labs has suggested such thing in a recent blog post. Cortana receives voice commands and can trigger various actions across Windows 10, but it can also “chat” with users and tell jokes.

Microsoft’s Ku also said that the technology developed by the startup will help his company make Office 365, Windows operating systems, Bing web search engine, and Microsoft Azure cloud-computing platform stronger while also empowering developers.

Apparently, Wand Labs has failed to come up on its own with an app or service that can be monetized. Its apps were silently removed from the Apple and Android app stores before the deal.

Wand Labs’ chief executive Virshal Sharma recently said that his firm’s experience with natural language, semantics, and messaging apps will be the perfect addition to Microsoft’s ongoing AI-related work.

Image Source: YouTube

Google Home, Amazon’s Echo New Rival

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"Google Home"

Google is rumored to launch Google Home, an Amazon’s Echo rival

By all accounts, Google will probably launch Google Home, a new competitor for Amazon’s Echo, today, Wednesday 18. Today is the Google I/O developer’s showcase.

The New York Times and Recode have reported that Google will launch a voice-activated device called “Google Home or Google Chirp” at the I/O developer conference in Mountain View.

The reports say Google’s new gizmo will be a home device, roughly shaped like Google’s OnHub Router, which will integrate the tech giant’s voice agent.

A few years ago Google added the “hotword” support to Android, which allows phones to respond to an “OK Google” command. Presumably, Google Home will have this command incorporated.

Echo, Amazon’s very own Home device, is a cylinder appliance that uses Alexa, a cloud-space digital assistant, to report news, craft shopping lists, turn on the alarm, the kitchen timer. It’s basically a loudspeaker that doubles as a microphone.

The beauty of Echo is in its Amazon Prime services integration that plays back audiobooks or your music selection by voice command. The voice command also allows you to shop or order items from Amazon.

But Google has the same capabilities and even more. With a hefty list of info and other commands users can ask “Google Ok” and other services like Google Express and Google Play Music, Google Home will come in strongly as a competitor for Amazon’s Echo.

It’s not yet certain if third-party services will be able to access Google Home through API. All of the popular food-delivery apps run on Android while Echo only allows you to order pizza from Dominos and a few restaurants in strategic cities over the US. However, Amazon has integrated other services like Uber and Audible with Alexa but came back with mixed results.

If Google Home allows developer access through API, it will boost the device even more.

The price and ship date for the Google Home gadget are still unknown. Echo has a price tag of $180. Will Google beat that?

With all the digital assistants clogging the market funnel – see Siri, Viv, Cortana, Alexa – will there still be a need for another one or a better one? We’re on the wait to see the results of Google’s I/O developer conference presentations and find out what other consumer technology will Google make available.

Image source: Flickr