Julie Bort explains:

IBM has acquired Cognea, a small Australian software company that makes a Siri-like "chat bot."

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, and Cognea, which was formerly named MyCyberTwin, hasn't publicly disclosed any venture investment.

Cognea was the third startup from Liesl Capper. She previously launched a dot-com-era search engine called Mooter, which went public in Australia and has since crashed, and Toptots Early Learning centres, a parent/child education company she founded in her 20s and sold.

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It's all part of IBM's master plan to turn Watson into the kind of conversational computer currently found only in the movies, one that blows away Siri and Windows Phone's new virtual assistant Cortana, Rhodin describes:

"We believe this focus on creating depth of personality, when combined with an understanding of the users’ personalities will create a new level of interaction that is far beyond today’s 'talking' smartphones. ... I’m not talking about just giving the computer a simple command or asking a simple question. That’s yesterday’s technology. I’m talking about more realistic conversations—everything from friendly chitchat to intense debate."

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According to Chatbots.org, 0ver 40,000 business and personal users created their own free chatbot on a free chatbot platform that Cognea offered.

Cognea also said it had some pretty high-powered customers, including State Farm, two Australian banks, NASA and HP, the company said on its AngelList page as spotted by TechCrunch's Leena Rao.