Chinese search engine Baidu has announced that it is purchasing Seattle-based Kitt.ai, a startup known for its natural language processing technology. Kitt.ai made three products: Snowboy, a hotword detection engine; NLU, a multilingual natural language understanding engine; and ChatFlow, a multi-turn conversation engine. The startup said it had achieved profitability prior to the acquisition.
Baidu is working to establish itself as a development platform for chatbots and other artificial intelligence applications.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
