Intel has acquired selected assets from Ginger Software, a digital personal assistant. The exact amount of the deal is not disclosed but according to TechCrunch it is up to $30M.
As per the terms of the deal, 16 engineers will move to Intel to work on the natural language processing while the remaining 40 will stay in a separately run division of Ginger Software, specialising in intelligent spelling and grammar correction software.The platform for creating personal assistants taps into the company’s Automatic Speech Recognition and Natural Language Understanding engines.
Intel acquired natural language processing tools and applications assets from Ginger. Along with the aforementioned assets, Intel also hired some Ginger engineers associated with this business,
a Ginger spokesperson told Techcrunch.
The acquisition will enable Intel to foray into the virtual assistant market which is gradually becoming crowded. Personal virtual assistant feature was first introduced by Apple via Siri for iPhone. Soon Google’s Android came up with Google Now and recently Windows has forayed in to it with Cortona for Windows Phone devices. It is predicted that Intel will use the Ginger software in one of its wearable devices.
Source: TechCrunch