Microsoft Corp. today announced that it’s acquiring Xoxco Inc., an artificial intelligence startup with a prominent spot in the chatbot ecosystem.

Austin-based Xoxco launched in 2009 and focuses mainly on providing development services for companies looking to build conversational assistants. The startup has worked with, among others, Microsoft itself according to today’s acquisition announcement. But it’s Xoxco’s internal projects that have made it a notable market player.

The startup is the developer of Botkit, an open-source toolkit for building chatbots that powers tens of thousands of assistants across Slack, Microsoft Teams and other messaging platforms. Xoxco also created the hugely popular Howdy assistant for Slack. Howdy is credited as the very first commercial meeting scheduling bot to launch on the service.

Xoxco’s efforts have been actively supported by Slack, which backed a $1.5 million funding round into the startup in 2015 alongside Bloomberg LP’s Bloomberg Beta fund. Microsoft said it will continue to support Howdy following the acquisition.

“We have shared goals to foster a community of startups and innovators, share best practices and continue to amplify our focus on conversational AI, as well as to develop tools for empowering people to create experiences that do more with speech and language,” Lili Cheng, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of conversational AI, wrote in a blog post.

For the tech giant, the acquisition appears to be primarily about absorbing Xoxco’s team of AI experts. Machine learning talent is a hot commodity these days: Microsoft and other tech giants are investing heavily in expanding their AI capabilities not just on the enterprise front, but across their consumer products as well.

Chabots are a particularly big focus area for Microsoft. In today’s announcement, Chen brought attention to the fact that the company’s open-source Bot Framework has been adopted by more than 360,000 developers to date.

The tech giant is actively working to increase that number. In conjunction with the acquisition of Xoxco, Microsoft launched a new open-source chatbot toolkit that provides ready-made software building blocks for developers.

The toolkit, called simply Virtual Assistant, includes a dozen modules on launch. Some provide customizable chatbot “skills” that cover common use cases such as recording to-do items, while the remaining modules are designed to help developers implement various backend functions.

“Microsoft is amplifying the concept of responsible conversational AI to help consumers have a seamless, efficient and accurate experience,” Joshua March, chief executive of the social messaging customer service platform Conversocial Inc., told SiliconANGLE. “We’ll continue to see more and more tech companies encouraging businesses to utilize and leverage AI in order to future-proof their businesses.”

Microsoft relies extensively on acquisitions as part of its AI roadmap. The Xoxco deal follows the company’s May purchase of Semantic Machines Inc., which offered a commercial chatbot platform. Microsoft’s other acquisitions this year included Bonsai AI Inc. and Lobe Inc., two startups that focused on simplifying the development of machine learning models.

With reporting from Robert Hof

Photo: Microsoft