Microsoft acquires Wand Labs

After buying LinkedIn for $26.2 billion earlier this week, Microsoft has just announced that the company is acquiring Wand Labs. The company’s latest acquisition is slightly different than its previous ones as this is possibly the first time Microsoft is buying a company to work on its Bot Framework. In a blog post, Microsoft announced that Wand Labs will be accelerating innovation in Bing intelligence, as well as Conversation As A Platform (aka Bot Framework).

Wand Labs’ technology and talent will strengthen our position in the emerging era of conversational intelligence, where we bring together the power of human language with advanced machine intelligence — connecting people to knowledge, information, services and other people in more relevant and natural ways. It builds on and extends the power of the Bing, Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and Windows platforms to empower developers everywhere.

The Wand team’s expertise around semantic ontologies, services mapping, third-party developer integration and conversational interfaces make them a great fit to join the Bing engineering and platform team, especially with the work we’re doing in the area of intelligent agents and chat bots. Founded in 2013 by CEO Vishal Sharma, an experienced leader and entrepreneur in the field of search and knowledge, Wand Labs has already been developing in areas specific to Conversation as a Platform.

Microsoft hasn’t disclosed the price of the acquisition – however, it will be quite interesting to see how Wand Labs will improve Microsoft’s Bot Framework and other cognitive services.