E-commerce and cloud computing firm Amazon has exited US-based natural language technology developer Kitt.AI in an acquisition of undisclosed size by internet company Baidu.
Kitt.AI, a spinout of research institute Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, is developing technology that will help AI systems decipher and converse in natural language.
The company’s product range consists of a customisable hotword detection platform called Snowboy, a multilingual natural language understanding engine dubbed NLU and a multi-turn dialogue tool called ChatFlow.
Xuchen Yao, founder of Kitt.IA, said in a blog post: “Today Kitt.AI joins Baidu, a search, AI, and autonomous driving company, to continue a joint mission of making the complex world simpler with (natural language understanding) technologies.
“How does this affect existing and future developers of Kitt.AI? Better products, better services and a peace of mind that Kitt.AI will continue to operate with its existing products in the years to come. Yes, literally nothing changes in our existing products and brands. We will be continuing to support developers with best of our efforts as we have always been.”
The company raised an undisclosed amount in a January 2016 round that included Amazon’s Alexa Fund and seed-stage venture capital fund Founders’ Co-op, and its website also lists VC firms Madrona Venture Group and A-Level Capital as investors.