Microsoft continues its research in artificial intelligence, this time in Montreal.

To accelerate efforts to improve products such as its personal assistant Cortana or its translation service linked to its platform Azure, Microsoft announced this week to have acquired the Montreal startup Maluuba, specializing in the processing of natural language.

Not surprisingly, the amount of the transaction was not disclosed.

Maluuba engineers and researchers, including co-founders Sam Pasupalak and Kaheer Suleman, have joined the ranks of Microsoft researchers. It should be noted that nothing concerning a transfer of these employees to one of the laboratories of the company throughout the world has been clearly announced by both parties.

The young company, who took care to emphasize the importance of the work done with the Montreal community, suggests that a move does not seem to be on the agenda.

“Through the work of the Université de Montréal and McGill University, the city has developed the greatest academic concentration of deep learning in the world: there are now about 150 researchers in universities in the region.

Canada’s academic, entrepreneurial, and startups communities are the driving force behind great innovation in AI, demonstrating that Canada, and particularly Montreal, can be a compelling alternative to Silicon Valley.

All the more so because of this acquisition, Microsoft is also winning an important advisor in the field of citizenship of the metropolis: Yoshua Bengio, founder of the Institute of Montreal Learning Algorithms (MILA). If this name seems familiar to you, it is that it is also the one that will manage the stock exchange of 4.5 million dollars announced by Google last November to advance the research in the recognition and modeling of the natural language.