Microsoft has announced that it is taking over Xoxco. The startup developed a number of useful programs for developers. Artificial intelligence, combined with various chat options, makes it possible for them to build their own chatbots with Xoxco’s products.
We have shared goals, and want to work together to create a community for startups and innovators, share best practices and continue to increase our focus on conversational AI, but also develop tools that allow people to build experiences that do more with speech and language,” said Lili Cheng from Microsoft in a blog about the acquisition.
The software
Founded in 2009, Xoxco focuses primarily on providing development services for companies that want to build assistants that allow staff to chat. Among other things, the startup developed the Botkit, an open-source toolkit that helps to build chatbots. This toolkit underlies tens of thousands of virtual assistants within Slack, Microsoft Teams and other chat apps.
The popular assistant Howdy for Slack is also developed by Xoxco. That was the first commercial bone for agenda planning to be launched on Slack. Xoxco received support from Slack, who invested one and a half million dollars in Xoxco, among other things. The takeover by Microsoft does not prevent the functionality of Howdy; according to Microsoft, the bot will simply receive support.
Make substantial investments
Microsoft will probably do the acquisition primarily to integrate the Xoxco AI team. The demand for developers with extensive knowledge of machine learning has increased considerably in recent years. Microsoft and other tech giants are investing billions in the development of artificial intelligence. This applies to both business and consumer products.
Chatbots get a lot of attention from Microsoft. The tech giant’s Bot Framework has already been used by more than 360,000 developers, and Microsoft is actively working on increasing that number. Together with the acquisition of Xoxco, Microsoft is also coming up with a new chatbot toolkit that provides developers with building blocks for chatbots – the Virtual Assistant.
This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.
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