Microsoft Acquires Semantic Machines as Company Pushes for 'Conversational AI' Development

Major tech companies have shown their own efforts in pushing for the development of artificial technology and incorporating it into their hardware products. As for Microsoft, their recent acquisition of Semantic Machines is proof that they are also in the AI race.

The current use of AI through several hardware products widely vary but the most common is its assistive functions where platforms like Siri and Alexa are focused on. For example, Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant are already reliable in reading the news, weather forecast, traffic update, and more to their users.

However, Microsoft wants to push further the typical command-based operation of AI systems. “For rich and effective communication, intelligent assistants need to be able to have a natural dialogue instead of just responding to commands. We call this ‘conversational AI,’” Microsoft’s AI and research chief David Ku said in a recent post.

Ku’s description of conversational AI might remind some people of the 2013 movie “Her” starring Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson’s voice as the very human-like computer AI.

Meanwhile, with that goal in mind, Ku announced that Microsoft has just acquired the Berkeley, California-based company, Semantic Machines, which according to the Microsoft exec “has developed a revolutionary new approach to building conversational AI.”

As to how they are going to develop conversational AI, Ku specifically mentioned their already existing digital assistant called Cortana. Whatever Microsoft and Semantic Machines will develop in the future, Ku revealed that they are also looking to incorporate that into "social chatbots like XiaoIce."

“With XiaoIce and Cortana, we’ve made breakthroughs in speech recognition and more recently become the first to add full-duplex voice sense to a conversational AI system, allowing people to carry on a conversation naturally,” Ku said.

On the other hand, it can also be recalled that Google has recently announced a huge improvement coming to Google Assistant that appear to be similar to Microsoft’s conversational AI. Earlier this month, Google demonstrated their upcoming technology called the Google Duplex. It is planned to be incorporated to their own digital assistant that would be able to make calls on its own and set appointments on behalf of the human user.