Baidu buys machine learning chatbot platform Kitt.AI
Chinese search engine Baidu has acquired natural language processing start-up Kitt.AI for an undisclosed amount. The deal will see the two firms "continue a joint mission of making the complex world simpler with natural language understanding technologies," according to a blog post by Xuchen Yao, CEO of Kitt.AI. He stressed the deal would not affect the company's existing products and brands.

Chinese search giant Baidu has acquired Kitt.AI, a natural language processing startup, for an undisclosed sum.

Since it was founded in 2014, Kitt has launched three products: Snowboy, a customizable hotword detection engine; NLU, a multilingual natural language engine; and ChatFlow, a framework for building chatbots.

The two companies will work together “to continue a joint mission of making the complex world simpler with natural language understanding technologies,” said Xuchen Yao, Kitt.AI’s founder and CEO, in a blog post announcing the deal.

“How does this affect existing and future developers of Kitt.AI?” said Yao. “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'll be continuing to support developers with best of our efforts as we have always been.”

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