The international technology giant Microsoft has reportedly acquired an Austin-based software developer called Xoxco. This acquisition has marked the fourth AI-related company Microsoft has purchased this year.
Founded in 2009, Xoxco has raised $1.5 million. It began working on bots in 2013, and is credited with developing the first bot for Slack to help schedule meetings. However, the financial details of the deal have not been disclosed.
“Today, we are announcing we have signed an agreement to acquire Xoxco, a software product design and development studio known for its conversational AI and bot development capabilities,” Lili Cheng stated.
With this move, Microsoft is continuing to realize our approach of democratizing AI development, conversation and dialog, and integrating conversational experiences where people communicate.
“It’s a tool that makes it much easier for you to go and create a virtual assistant. It orchestrates a number of components that we offer, but we didn’t make them easy to use [together]. And so it’s really simplifying the creation of a virtual assistant,” Cheng explained.
The new Virtual Assistant Accelerator solution announced today also aligns with the Xoxco purchase. Eric Boyd, corporate VP for AI at Microsoft says the Virtual Assistant Accelerator pulls together some AI tools such as speech-to-text, natural language processing and an action engine into a single place to simplify bot creation.