Back in 2017, Cisco Systems Inc. shelled out $125 million to acquire MindMeld Inc., an early-stage startup that had created a platform for building voice assistants. The offering was one of the first development tools focused specifically on conversational artificial intelligence.

Cisco announced Wednesday that it’s releasing MindMeld under an open-source Apache 2.0 license. The move is meant to lower the adoption barrier for enterprises looking to add voice features to their applications. Just  as important, it will enable outside developers to improve upon to the platform and contribute their code back to the project.

MindMeld provides a set of tools that cover most of the core tasks involved in building a conversational AI. At the heart of the platform is a natural-language processing engine for parsing spoken commands. It can identify the topic a user is talking about, isolate what it is exactly they’re asking for and analyze “entities” such as restaurant names that require special interpretation.

Once a request is parsed, it’s passed on to MindMeld’s question-answering engine. The system can automatically generate replies by drawing on a corpus of information provided in advance by the application developer. MindMeld includes a dedicated module for managing a service’s knowledge repository that helps with tasks such as organizing data and finding alternative answers when an application’s first reply misses the mark.

Since acquiring MindMeld, Cisco has integrated the platform its Webex video conferencing platform. The company last month launched a feature called Webex Assistant the enables workers to use voice commands to join virtual meeting rooms, call colleagues and control the volume settings on their microphone.

Now that MindMeld is open-source, other companies can start harnessing the platform’s capabilities for use cases beyond communications. Cisco has set up a website for the project with technical documentation and application templates to help developers get started.

“By making this open source software and companion documentation available to partners and developers, Cisco is committed to helping more enterprises find success building and deploying a wide range of conversational applications,” Karthik Raghunathan, the director of research for the MindMeld team, wrote in a blog post.

Photo: Cisco