Microsoft acquires Wand Labs Indian startup to implement its "conversations as a platform" vision.
According to PC World, Microsoft just bought the Indian developer of a chat app for iOS. Corporate Vice President David Ku wrote Thursday, June 16, in a Microsoft blog post announcing the deal that the Wand team will be joining Bing's engineering and platform group. The team members will be working on creating intelligent virtual assistants and chatbots.
Wand Labs is a messaging startup that has been launched in 2013 by IIT-Delhi alumnus Vishal Sharma, previously the vice president of products at Google. The company has been working since then on chat apps that allow adding outside information from sources like Yelp. Users could also let other people access their smart home devices and share music using Wand.
The chat app was tested by the company in private trials but the service has not been released broadly to consumers. Now, Sharma, Wand Labs CEO, said in a blog post that the Wand service will be shut down.
Microsoft's overall vision for conversational interaction between computers and humans match well Wand's features. Earlier this year, at the Microsoft's Build conference, company executives showed off a vision of humans interacting with bots representing businesses. The bots helped humans to complete tasks like making a restaurant reservation or booking a hotel room.
Ku mentioned Wand team's expertise on a variety of topics, including third-party developer semantics, integration and conversational interfaces as reasons for the company to join Microsoft. With the acquisition, it is likely Microsoft will also use some of the ideas and technology behind Wand.
According to the website profit.ndtv.com, Microsoft's acquisition of Wand Labs builds on and extends the power of the Bing search engine, Office 365, the cloud computing platform Azure and Windows platforms to empower developers everywhere. However, this is the second acquisition by Microsoft this week, coming after revealing plans to buy LinkedIn in a deal worth over US$26 billion.
