Workplace communications are quickly moving beyond email systems to platforms like Slack. And one of the reasons we find Slack so appealing for our professional lives is all the tools it offers and the ease with which we can stay in touch.
Naturally, technologists are finding ways to automate some of that back and forth. And Austin-based XOXCO is one of the leaders in building digital coworkers using artificial intelligence and bots. Their popular app Howdy, for example, will essentially run team meetings by asking routine questions, collecting input from all parties and summarizing it.
Microsoft sees this type of conversational AI as part of its future, and on Wednesday it announced it is acquiring XOXCO. Terms of the deal weren't shared.
It's perhaps a natural move for Microsoft because XOXCO is also well-known for creating Botkit, which is a set of development tools that are commonly used to create Slack and Facebook Messenger bots on GitHub, which Microsoft acquired in October for about $7.5 billion. Microsoft has also recently scooped up conversational AI startup Semantic Machines, as well as Bonsai, a machine learning and simulation company.
XOXCO was founded in 2008 by CEO Ben Brown and COO Katie Spence -- they are husband and wife. Brown previously founded Consumating.com, a social network that was acquired by CNET in 2005. In a new blog post, Brown says that the idea of chatbots was just starting when he and Spence started their company.
"We found a developer ecosystem hungry for resources — searching for tools, tutorials or well-defined best practices. It was like the early days of the web… an exciting Wild West of new technology and fresh opportunity!" he wrote. "With that in mind, we set out to help fill the world with friendly, helpful robots. We asked ourselves, 'What if we could give people most of a bot, and let them fill in the details with simple building blocks?'"
The startup raised $1.5 million in venture capital funding from Bloomberg Beta, True Ventures and Outlier -- as well as angel investors -- in 2015.
After launching Botkit, Brown and Spence organized a community of bot builders called Talkabot, which meets on the third Wednesday of each month. The group has 845 members on Meetup.com.
"This signals a bright future for bots and bot builders and is a deep commitment from myself and everyone involved to creating an open platform to build this exciting new type of software," Brown wrote.
