Maluuba wants to make chatbots smarter by teaching them how to read

Maluuba launched its first Siri-like personal assistant at TC Disrupt San Francisco four years ago. Since then, the company has raised 11 million and has licensed its technology to a number of handset manufacturers that now use it to power their own personal-assistant features. As Maluuba's head of product Mo Musbah told me, the company spent the last two years doubling down on how it could utilize deep learning in the context of natural language processing. To do so, it recently opened an R&D office in Montreal, for example. As Musbah told me, "our vision there is to build one of the largest deep learning labs in the world," so the company is definitely not lacking in ambition.