Microsoft has announced it taking over Semantic Machines ‘that has developed a revolutionary new approach to building conversational AI.’ The ambition of the procurement is to progress in conversational AI, which entails the AI-driven bots and assistants to carry out meaningful conversations like and with humans.
Based in Berkeley of California, Semantic Machines uses machine learning to allow users to interact with information and services naturally with significantly less effort.
Quite a handful of people that are leading the company are the pioneers in conversational AI. These include tech entrepreneur Dan Roth, Stanford University professor Percy Liang, UC Berkeley professor Dan Klein, and former Apple chief speech scientist Larry Gillick.
On the other hand, there are fundamental research and breakthroughs in the concerned field in the bag of Microsoft. This has involved its ongoing works on speech recognition and natural language understanding for over two decades now.
One major mark of the company came in 2016 when it introduced a framework to develop bots. The same year saw it released the pre-built Cognitive Services to get the assistants to grasp speech and natural language understanding. This service is used by over 300,000 developers alongside Azure Bot Service, eyeing to “make computing more conversational.”
Microsoft’s assistant Cortana is in the mix too, and so are the social chatbots such as XiaoIce, in its developmental spree on conversational AI. The tech leader has already experienced breakthroughs with Cortana and XiaoIce in speech recognition.
Most remarkably, Microsoft has recently become the first in the flock to add full-duplex voice sense to a conversational AI system. The objective is to expand the global vision of computers where they can naturally act (see, hear, talk and understand) like humans.
The company’s plan is to open a conversation AI center of excellence in the city of Berkeley to expansively understand the potential of language interfaces. The combination of Microsoft’s AI advances and Semantic’s technology directs towards them delivering progressively productive user experiences, advancing conversational computing.
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