Cisco has announced the acquisition privately held artificial intelligence (AI) company MindMeld for $125 million. Cisco plans to incorporate MindMeld’s AI technology into Cisco Spark, its collaboration suite, to help power human-like conversational interfaces.
MindMeld specializes in developing conversational interfaces, such as those used to interact with chatbots providing customer support that are capable of supporting unstructured and semi-unstructured conversations. MindMeld uses machine learning technologies, such as natural language processing, question answering, and dialog management.
The company’s approach is based on something known as natural language understanding. In MindMeld’s case, that means its platform ingests customer data to create a natural language model that is specific to a client’s industry and particular requirements. It also offers a dialog manager that enables a computer to respond to user requests through chat and voice applications in a human-like fashion.
MindMeld is Cisco’s second acquisition in the last two weeks. Earlier this month, the company said it was buying Viptela, a software-defined wide area network company, to better help enterprise clients manage large networks that are being overwhelmed by the proliferation of mobile and IoT devices.
