Baidu acquires natural language startup Kitt.ai, maker of chatbot engine ChatFlow

China's search giant Baidu has made another acquisition to continue its push into artificial intelligence, and specifically to help it carve out a place for itself as a platform for developers who want to create chatbots and other services based on natural language technology. Baidu has acquired Kitt.ai, a profitable startup based out of Seattle that has developed a framework to build and power chatbots and voice-based applications across multiple platforms and devices (presumably named after this Kitt). The deal has been confirmed to us directly by Baidu. It was also announced on stage at Baidu's developer event in Beijing, confirmed in a blog post from Kitt.ai, and also made public with a short note from Baidu on Weibo. Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed, a Baidu spokesperson said. Kitt.ai has been around since 2014, but it appears that it had only disclosed a seed round of funding of an unspecified size as a startup.