Microsoft acquires AI powered botmaker XOXCO

Microsoft has officially announced they are acquiring XOXCO, a company that specialized in conversational AI and bot-making though its core products, Howdy.ia and Botkit (via ZDNet). The Redmond giant is clearly interested in this kind of space in the AI industry, although its plans for what it will do with its newly acquired assets is still unknown. Furthermore, how much the company was bought for has not been disclosed, either.

Howdi.ai is a “commercially available bot for Slack that helps schedule meetings” which is used to build bots for many different purposes as well as chat integrations and voice skills. It’s worth noting that Slack competes with Microsoft’s own Teams messaging app for built for small businesses, which recently lost app support on Windows 10 devices with S Mode.

In addition, Botkit is a collection of development tools “used by hundreds of thousands of developers” on GitHub, which Microsoft acquired for $7.5 billion in stock earlier this year. In addition to GitHub, the company has also made numerous other strategic investments as part of its push to advance AI into the mainstream.

Microsoft is expected to use the technology from XOXCO to improve its Microsoft Bot Framework, which helps developers build bots for various chat and social media apps. According to the tech giant, the framework is currently supporting as many as 360,000 developers. For now, thought, we’ll just have to wait and see how this all pans out. In the meantime, you can share what you think about its acquisition and how it will help Microsoft reach its AI goals in the comment area below.