According to most tech gurus, chat applications could be the next big thing in the world of modern technology and it is not a surprise that the biggest tech companies in the world are either developing their own chat apps or buying companies which specialise in developing chat apps. Global technology giant Microsoft has however taken the second route in relation to its quest develop its own chat applications by acquiring the company Wand, a chat app that is quite popular on the iOS. In fact, Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella had stated in the past that chat apps could end up being a legitimate platform as far as computing is concerned and this new acquisition proves that he is willing to bet on his convictions.
Wand will report directly to David Wu, the corporate VP of the engineering and platform arm of Bing. Wu announced the deal in a blog post. He wrote, "This acquisition accelerates our vision and strategy for Conversation as a Platform, which Satya Nadella introduced at our Build 2016 conference in March.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. "
A report on the website PCWorld stated why the deal made sense, "It's a natural fit for Wand, which had been working since 2013 on apps that let users chat with one another and add outside information from sources like Yelp. Users could share music and let other people access their smart home devices using Wand, too. The company had conducted private trials of its service but hadn't released it broadly to consumers.Wand's features fit well with Microsoft's overall vision for conversational interaction between humans and computers. "
