Microsoft Corp. has announced that it has acquired Maluuba Inc., a Montreal-based deep learning company that is dedicated to building general-purpose artificial intelligence.

According to Microsoft, Maluuba’s expertise with natural language understanding aligns with the company’s goal of democratizing AI, making it more accessible for everyone.

“Maluuba’s vision is to advance toward a more general artificial intelligence by creating literate machines that can think, reason and communicate like humans — a vision exactly in line with ours,” said Harry Shum, executive vice president of Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence and Research Group.

Shum added that he thinks the acquisition could spur a number of services that need conversational AI. “Maluuba’s impressive team is addressing some of the fundamental problems in language understanding by modeling some of the innate capabilities of the human brain, from memory and common sense reasoning to curiosity and decision making,” he said.

In a statement, Maluuba founders Kaheer Suleman (above left) and Sam Pasupalak (above right) said that understanding human language is “the holy grail in the field of AI,” and they believe that Microsoft’s resources will allow the team to accelerate their research.

Maluuba’s engineering and research team will join Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence and Research organization under Shum. Yoshua Bengio, a leading AI expert and an adviser to Maluuba, will also be serving in an advisory role for Microsoft’s AI team. Maluuba’s founders credited Bengio with helping Montreal become hotbed of AI research.

In the last year alone, both Microsoft and Alphabet Inc. have invested heavily in Montreal’s AI research community. In November, for example, Alphabet announced that it would be opening a new AI research lab in Montreal, and the company gave a $3.4 million research grant to the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, an academic federation of AI researchers headed by Bengio. Shortly afterward, Microsoft announced that it had created a new AI research fund, and the fund’s first beneficiary was Montreal-based AI startup Element AI.

“Canada’s academic, enterprise, and startup ecosystems are driving great innovation in fields like AI,” said Maluuba’s founders, “demonstrating that Canada, and more specifically Montreal, can be a compelling alternative to Silicon Valley.”

Microsoft did not disclose the terms of the deal.

Image courtesy of Maluuba