Microsoft Keeps Up AI Conversation With Its Acquisition Of XOXOCO

Microsoft (MSFT) announced it will purchase XOXOCO, a startup that develops conversational artificial intelligence, or chatbots, to help businesses and employees adopt artificial intelligence to communicate and work better together.

XOXOCO is known for Howdy, the first commercially available bot add-on developed for Slack. It also developed Botkit, an open source of building blocks for bot development that’s used by hundreds of thousands of developers across GitHub.

In its AI Blog post, Microsoft states: “We are announcing we have signed an agreement to acquire XOXOCO, a software product design and development studio known for its conversational AI and bot development capabilities.”

XOXOCO will be the fourth A.I.- focused company to join the tech giant in the last six months. Others who’ve joined Microsoft include Semantic Machines, Bonsai and Lobe. Microsoft says its end goal is, “to make AI and its development accessible to everyone.”

"We have shared goals to foster a community of startups and innovators, share best practices and continue to amplify our focus on conversational AI, as well as to develop tools for emerging people to create experiences that do more with speech and language," the Microsoft Blog post read.

Supporting over 360,000 developers, the Microsoft Bot Framework is available in Azure and GitHub.

"Our goal is to make AI accessible and valuable to every individual and organization, amplifying human ingenuity with intelligent technology. To do this, Microsoft is infusing intelligence across all its products and services to extent individuals’ and organizations’ capabilities and make them more productive, providing a powerful platform of AI services and tools that makes innovation by developers and partners faster and more accessible, and helping transform business by enabling breakthroughs to current approaches and entirely new scenarios that leverage the power of intelligent technology," the Microsoft blog post continued.

In a blog post, Ben Brown, co-founder of XOXOCO, said he and co-founder Katie Spence are “extremely excited” to announce the acquisition.

“This signals a bright future for bots and bot builders and is a deep commitment from myself and everyone involved to creating an open platform to build this exciting new type of software. I am excited to begin this new phase with Microsoft!” Brown wrote.