Microsoft has announced last Friday that it has acquired Maluuba, a Canadian artificial Intelligence (AI) startup. This will help Microsoft improve and develop artificial intelligence with better language understanding and communication skills. Though it is yet to release an artificially intelligent voice assistant like those of Goggle Assistant and Amazon Alexa, Microsoft has been strengthening its AI capabilities in the recent years.

Microsoft joined hands with Google, Facebook, IBM and Amazon in September of last year, to be able to launch a nonprofit which they called the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society, or in short, the Partnership, directed at understanding of AI advancement for the general public.

With the attainment of Maluuba, Microsoft will apparently have an advantage in regards to natural language processing. The startup developed a deep learning research lab for natural language understanding and works on improving communication capabilities and relationship between humans and machines as well.

As per dropped hints of the executive vice president of Microsoft's artificial intelligence and research group Harry Shum in his Jan. 13 blog post, he said that Maluuba's vision on advancing toward a more general artificial intelligence by making literate machines that can reason and communicate like humans exactly resembles with Microsoft's and this could possibly happen with Conversational AI.

He is apparently referring the "Conversational AI" as Cortana. Cortana is the current Microsoft's leading voice-based application; however, comparing it to other voice assistants, Microsoft's Cortana seemingly basic since it just mostly combines voice commands and search algorithms. The said acquisition will help Microsoft's AI capabilities get a major boost and may lead to creating Cortana even smarter in the near future.

Students at the University of Waterloo made the startup, Maluuba, which was launched in 2010. It makes programs that use natural-language processing, which aids computers understand dialogue and improve reasoning capabilities in areas of research known as deep learning and reinforcement learning.