Artificial intelligence is taking center stage at Baidu Inc.’s annual Create developer conference today.

Alongside a deep learning partnership with Nvidia Corp., the Chinese search giant has announced that it’s acquiring a venture-backed chatbot startup called Kitt.ai Inc. The Seattle-based firm’s claim to fame is a suite of tools designed to help developers create virtual assistants that meet the same standards as Apple Inc.’s Siri and Google Inc.’s Assistant.

Snowboy, the first product in Kitt.ai’s lineup, makes it possible to equip a bot with the ability to launch upon hearing a certain phrase. Just as Google Assistant triggers when a user says “OK Google,” a robot vacuum manufacturer could program its devices to respond to the name Rosie. The two other tools that the startup offers enable developers to build a conversational engine for handling user input.

The first, NLU, is a natural-language processing framework built to address the linguistic aspect of the task. Its companion is a system called ChatFlow that can be used to let a bot steer conversations towards subjects with relevance for the user request at hand. Kitt.ai’s website claims that the tools lend themselves to powering both chat-based and voice assistants.

Co-founder Xuchen Yao added in a blog post that the products will continue to remain available under Baidu’s wing. The search giant likely plans to incorporate them into its cloud platform in a bid to narrow the feature gap with US-based rivals that already offer chatbot development services. Among them is Google, which entered the race just last year with a similar startup acquisition.

But the chatbot technology is only one aspect of today’s deal. Baidu is also set to absorb Kitt.ai’s team of machine learning experts, which is led by Xuchen Yao and two other PhDs with strong academic credentials. The know-how that they bring to the table should be equally valuable at a time when the company is actively competing over AI talent with other tech giants.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Image: Simon Brunozzi