Microsoft, the company that just bought LinkedIn for $26.2 billion, announced another acquisition this week—Wand Labs, a startup that builds messaging apps and the tech behind them. No financial details of the acquisition have been released yet.
Wand Labs is shutting down their services, which were still in beta, but in a blog post, Vishal Sharma stated that onlookers could expect to see “familiar elements” of their work in the future.
The acquisition is in line with the new strategy that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella calls “Conversation as a Platform,” essentially a repackaging of Bing as bots and a bot development framework.
Wand Labs’ work in machine learning and artificial intelligence may help solve a pain point for the legacy software developer.
One of Microsoft’s initial forays into AI was the Tay.ai Twitter bot, which was supposed to be an experiment in public interaction—until the trolls of the Internet fed it racist language until it started to mimic them. The bot was taken down and shuttered, but not after malfunctioning again a couple days later and sending out 4,200 tweets in 15 minutes.
While the episode was publicly embarrassing, it will serve as a valuable use case for Microsoft’s AI development team. It's also a cautionary tale for those that would attempt to develop human-seeming interaction in apps or on the Web.