Jing Kun, general manager of Baidu's Duer business unit, announced during Baidu's AI developer conference that the company fully acquired AI start-up Kitt.AI.

With this acquisition, Baidu plans to integrate Kitt.AI's voice ability and natural language processing ability into Baidu platform and fully open the backend to Baidu's cooperating partners for free.

Kitt.AI focuses on voice wakeup and natural voice interactive technologies. Specializing in AI research, Kitt.AI's technologies are used in intelligent chat robots. It once developed a "voice hot word detection" function, which helps technical developers realize free-of-charge voice activation function on any devices.

Kitt.AI previously was part of the artificial intelligence institute incubator of Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft. The company also gained early investments from Amazon and Madrona.