Excelsior Correspondent
JAMMU, June 18: Technol-ogy giant Microsoft has acquired a messaging-app developer, founded by an Indian having roots in Jammu.
Reports said that Microsoft acquired California-based Wand Labs, a start-up which builds messaging technology for apps, founded in 2013 by IIT-Delhi alumnus Vishal Sharma, whose mother is from Jammu, J&K State. Vishal was previously the vice-president, product at Google.
Vishal Sharma said it is an “exciting time” to be working in the area of semantics and conversation, an area that Satya Nadella (India born CEO of Microsoft) has highlighted as core to the future. “Making experiences for customers more seamless by harnessing human language is a powerful vision and one that motivates me and my team,” Sharma said, adding that Wands experience with semantics and messaging are a “natural fit” for the work already underway at Microsoft, especially in the area of intelligent agents and cognitive services.
“This acquisition accelerates our vision and strategy for Conversation as a Platform which Satya Nadella introduced at our Build 2016 conference,” Corporate Vice President, Information Platform Group at Microsoft David Ku said in a statement.
During the Build conference in March, Nadella told thousands of developers that he envisages a technological future where computer software can learn the human language and have natural conversations with people.
Nadella had said that Microsoft wants to take the power of human language and apply it more pervasively to all of the computing interface and interactions.
Ku said Wand Labs technology and talent would strengthen Microsofts 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”.
The acquisition builds on and extends the power of the Microsofts search engine Bing, its cloud computing platform Azure, Office 365 and Windows platforms to empower developers everywhere.
Describing Vishal Sharma as an “experienced leader and entrepreneur” in the field of search and knowledge, Ku said the Wand team will make significant contributions to Microsofts innovation of Bing intelligence.
Trending Now
E-Paper
Follow our WhatsApp channel