Baidu has acquired Kitt.ai, a profitable startup based out of Seattle that has developed a framework to build and power chatbots and voice-based applications across multiple platforms and devices (presumably named after this Kitt).
The deal has been confirmed to us directly by Baidu. It was also announced on stage at Baidu’s developer event in Beijing, confirmed in a blog post from Kitt.ai, and also made public with a short note from Baidu on Weibo. Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed, a Baidu spokesperson said.
The company had released three products, all of which will remain operational as before: Snowboy (“a customizable hotword detection engine”), NLU (“a multilingual natural language understanding engine”), and ChatFlow (a multi-turn conversation engine that we covered here), and appeared to be built as a cross-platform service, improving its ubiquity.
