Microsoft has announced the acquisition of a messaging app developer called Wand Labs as part of its conversation-as-a-platform push.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, after drinking a pint of unicorn blood, outlined making robots talk as a major new area of interest for the firm at the recent Build conference.

David Ku, corporate vice president [surely death eater.ed] of Microsoft’s Information Platform Group, explained that Wand Labs' technology could be added to key Microsoft products, such as Bing, Azure, Office 365 and Windows.

"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. 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."

Vishal Sharma, CEO of Wand Labs, added that now is an ideal time to become a death eater... er join Microsoft. He said:

“It’s an exciting time to be working in the area of semantics and conversation. Our deep experience with semantics, messaging and authority are a natural fit for the work already underway at Microsoft, especially in the area of intelligent agents and cognitive services."

 

Chat bots are already being deployed in several sectors and are even getting into the consumer market. They have yet to be seen in the world of children's fiction