China’s search giant Baidu has made another acquisition to continue its push into artificial intelligence, and specifically carving out a place for itself as a platform for developers who want to create chatbots and other services based on natural language technology. It 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. Terms of the deal — which was announced on stage at Baidu’s developer event in Beijing, and also confirmed in a blog post from Kitt.ai — are not being disclosed.
Kitt.ai has been around since 2014, but it appears that it had only disclosed a seed round of funding of an unspecified size as a startup. Its backers were Amazon’s Alexa Fund and the Founders Co-op.
