Microsoft acquired an AI startup to make Cortana more human-like

Google showed us the advancement of Assistant where it is able to make calls to a restaurant and a hair salon to make a booking for its owner. It even had a voice that mimics how a human would speak and that seemed to cause quite a stir among the tech giants that have their own smart assistant.

One of them is Microsoft, which recently acquired an AI startup, Semantic Machines, to make bots and assistant more human-like. This acquisition will be put towards the development of their Azure Bot Service that is used by 300,000 developers and with Cortana. David Ku, CTO of Microsoft AI & Research said that they will establish a conversational AI Center of Excellence in Berkeley to push the boundaries of language interfaces.

A lot of people are on the fence with the idea that smart assistants can make calls on behalf of its user, and right after Google finished their announcement, the Internet was filled with ethical questions and Memes that poked at the idea that machines are replacing humans. However, there are some that welcomed the idea, stating that this advancement could be a huge benefit to the user that have extremely busy schedules and would rather invest their time in something more productive than taking the time to making an appointment with a hair salon.