Microsoft Acquires Machine Learning Startup To Help You Clean Up That Mess of Data

Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Microsoft has agreed to acquire Equivio, an Israeli-based startup that uses machine learning to sort large amounts of data into relevant groups.

On Tuesday, Rajesh Jha, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Outlook and Office 365, announced the news on the company blog, writing that Equivio’s technology would help Microsoft customers deal with “the legal and compliance challenges inherent in managing large quantities of email and documents.” That’s because Equivio uses text analysis software to sift through large amounts of unstructured data and place documents and other pieces of text into relevant groups. The end goal is to save Microsoft’s corporate clients time and money.

“Businesses and governments around the world generate enormous volumes of data every day,” Jha wrote. “Traditional techniques for finding relevant documents are falling behind as the growth of data outpaces peoples’ ability to manually process it.”

This move by Microsoft is just the most recent example of how machine learning, technology once relegated to research and development labs, is pervading the tools and apps we use everyday. We use it every time we ask Siri for listings of nearby restaurants and every time Google Now gives you preemptive information on traffic before you have an upcoming appointment. It’s part of Amazon product recommendations and Facebook’s facial recognition tools. Now, Microsoft wants to bring it to its email and office services, too.

Equivio is already widely used by law firms and government agencies. Its machine learning capabilities help people in the legal profession find and transfer electronic files for eDiscovery. Users can also train Equivio’s technology to recognize and group certain types of documents together. In bringing these additional capabilities to its Office and Outlook products, Microsoft is clearly looking for new ways to stay competitive with other companies, including Google, which have developed increasingly popular tools for document management in recent years.

“Microsoft is serious about providing customers with tools to manage the legal and compliance requirements that are key to responsible business practices,” Jha wrote. “Office 365 includes robust eDiscovery and information governance capabilities today, and we’ll use Equivio’s machine learning technology to make these vital tools even more intelligent and easy to use in the months ahead.”