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发帖数: 1034 | 1 Posted 14 hours ago by Ingrid Lunden (@ingridlunden)
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Apple has Siri, and now Intel has Ginger. The chipmaker has made one more
acquisition to bolster its advanced computing and artificial intelligence
holdings: it has purchased selected assets, and hired talent, from Israel’s
Ginger Software in the area of natural language processing tools and
applications. Those assets include a platform for third parties to create
customised personal assistants, for a price believed to be up to $30 million.
Ginger Software, backed by investors like Li Ka-Shing’s Horizons Ventures,
will continue to operate as an independent business focusing on its
remaining business: intelligent grammar and spell checking software. This is
not the only change afoot at Ginger: the company recently saw its
chairperson, Soffer Teeni, leave to head up Facebook Israel.
Rumors of the deal were first reported by Hebrew publication Calcalist, and
now we have confirmed them directly with Ginger Software and Intel.
“Intel acquired natural language processing tools and applications assets
from Ginger. Along with the aforementioned assets, Intel also hired some
Ginger engineers associated with this business,” a Ginger spokesperson told
me.
“On May 8, Intel acquired natural language processing tools and
applications assets from Ginger Software, and it is hiring up to 16
engineers associated with this business,” an Intel spokesperson further
elaborated. “We are not disclosing details about how Intel might use the
Ginger Software technologies at this time and we are not disclosing terms of
the deal. Please note – We’re acquiring the assets and engineering team
associated with Ginger Software’s natural language processing tools and
applications. We aren’t acquiring Ginger Software’s Grammar and Spell
Checker.”
Among the 16 that are going are Ginger’s founder, CEO and Chief Scientist
of the Personal Assistant business of the company, Yael Karov. She is an NLP
expert, and this is her fourth exit: among the others was a role as co-
founder and CTO of the NLP company Agentics, which was acquired by Mercado
Software.
The group also includes natural language processing wiz Micha Breakstone,
who was the VP for R&D of the Personal Assistant business, and the person
who founded the acquired business unit under Karov’s guidance. Breakstone,
from what we understand, was also the first consultant hired to work on
Summly — the summarizing app acquired by Yahoo, with its young founder Nick
D’Aloisio now heading up Yahoo’s News Digest efforts.
Karov explains the decision to split the business and sell the personal
assistant part to Intel like this:
“Ginger had two separate business units, each of them had a different
technology, target market, and CEO (I was the CEO of both units until 6
months ago Maoz joined to manage the English as a Second Language, and I
moved to manage the Personal Assistant only),” she says. “The first
business – English as a second language was not for sale. It has a
commercial consumer product with many mobile and desktop users, and our plan
is to use the proceeds from the personal assistant asset sale in order to
continue and improve our products, and scale up Ginger. We also plan a big
release of a communication product for native English Speakers. The
innovative NLP technology for sale was managed and developed by a separate
team that I led.
We plan to continue and broaden the original business of Ginger and get to
hundreds of millions of users. We don’t plan to sell the Ginger business.”
As for the price, Calcalist pegged the price at between $20 million and $30
million. Later, tech blog Geek Time put the price at between $10 million and
$20 million. We’re continuing to dig and see if we can find out more on
this front.
The deal is an interesting one for Intel, in that it builds on other
investments and acquisitions that the company has made into the area of
advanced computing — a nebulous area that includes not only artificial
intelligence and how users can interact with computing devices but new
frontiers in what forms those computers may even take.
Among the 57 acquisitions made by the company in the last seven years,
several recent additions in this same vein include wearables company Basis
Science, gesture control specialist Omek Interactive, and natural language
processing company Indysis.
It seems like the value of these kinds of acquisitions is two-fold for Intel
future generations of hardware where functions like these may be standard.
But on the other hand, the company can also use the tech in itself as a
service to sell to third parties (think here not of phones, but new ‘
hardware’ like connected cars, home monitoring systems, and so on); perhaps
even to use in products itself.
With Apple yet (and perhaps never?) to release APIs for Siri-like services
in apps, the idea of a really useful, working personal assistant platform
open for anyone to create their own customised version of such a feature
remains something of a holy grail. |
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