Microsoft Acquires XOXCO in Latest Step Towards AI | Financial Buzz

Microsoft Acquires XOXCO in Latest Step Towards AI

In a latest push for AI, Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) announced that it will go through with the acquisition of XOXCO, a software product design and development studio known for its conversational AI and bot development capabilities. The company is known for the development of the Howdy chatbot.

Lili Cheng – Corporate Vice President, Conversational AI, explained in a blog post, “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 empowering people to create experiences that do more with speech and language.”

XOXCO has been paving the way in conversational AI since 2013 and was responsible for the creation of Howdy, the first commercially available bot for Slack that helps schedule meetings, and Botkit, which provides the development tools used by hundreds of thousands of developers on GitHub. Over the years, we have partnered with XOXCO and have been inspired by this work.

“The Microsoft Bot Framework, available as a service in Azure and on GitHub, supports over 360,000 developers today. With this acquisition, we are continuing to realize our approach of democratizing AI development, conversation and dialog, and integrating conversational experiences where people communicate.”