San Francisco May 21 (IANS) While Google has been working on life-like version of its spoken Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology Microsoft has jumped on the bandwagon by acquiring US-based AI developer "Semantic Machines" to develop the technology closer to how humans speak.

"With this acquisition Microsoft plans to establish a conversational AI centre of excellence in Berkeley California to experiment and integrate natural language processing (NLP) technology in its products like Cortana " David Ku Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of AI and Research at Microsoft wrote in a blog post.
"For rich and effective communication intelligent assistants need to be able to have a natural dialogue instead of just responding to commands " said Ku.
Recently Microsoft became the first to add "full-duplex" voice sense to a conversational AI system for users to carry on a conversation naturally with its chatbot XiaoIce and AI-powered assistant Cortana.
"Full-duplex" is a technique to communicate in both directions simultaneously mostly like a telephone call with AI-based technology conversing on one side.
A "Semantic Machines" core product its "conversation engine" extracts its responses from natural voice or text input and then generates a self-updating learning framework for managing dialog context and user goals.
"Today s commercial natural language systems like Siri Cortana and Google Now only understand commands not conversations " said "Semantic Machines" in a post.
"With our conversational AI we aim to develop technology that goes beyond understanding commands to understanding conversations " the company added.
Earlier in May Sundar Pichai CEO Google introduced "Duplex" at Google I/O and demonstrated how AI system could book an appointment at a salon and a table at a restaurant where the Google Assistant sounded like a human.
It used Google DeepMind s new "WaveNet" audio-generation technique and other advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) to replicate human speech patterns.

--IANS rp/sku/mag/mr