Following its DeepMind acquisition 9 months ago, Google continues to build its artificial intelligence initiative, and has bought two University of Oxford spinoffs in the field.

Dark Blue Labs, led by Professor Nando de Freitas, Professor Phil Blunsom, Dr Edward Grefenstette and Dr Karl Moritz Hermann, will focus on research to enable machines, (computers or robots), better understand what users say and are asking of them.

Vision Factory applies AI to enhance the accuracy and speed of object recognition and other vision-based systems. It is led by Dr Karen Simonyan, Max Jaderberg and Professor Andrew Zisserman, and will help Google improve its object recognition in search, camera-based search apps, and data-processing systems for self-driving cars.