Why it matters to you
Microsoft’s new tools and services for developers will enhance applications and services with a more intelligent, personal experience for end-users.
During the Build 2017 keynote on Wednesday, Microsoft detailed its plans to bring artificial intelligence into the hands of every developer. This initiative includes making enhancements to its Microsoft Bot Framework, adding new AI-based “cognitive” services, a new “lab” for testing experimental cognitive services, incorporating artificial intelligence into additional products and services, and more.
For starters, Microsoft’s Cognitive Services suite brings machine-based intelligence spanning vision, speech, language, knowledge, and search to applications. They’re the backbone of features like facial recognition, speech recognition, text translation, image search, and so on. Microsoft now provides 29 distinct Cognitive Services, with Bing Custom Search, Custom Vision Service, Custom Decision Service, and Video Indexer now added to the portfolio today.
Microsoft also launched the Cognitive Services Labs platform, enabling developers to play with experimental cognitive services. One of the first experiments on the plate is a gesture API that enables end-users to control and interact with apps using simple hand motions. Harry Shum, Executive Vice President of Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence and Research Group, indicated more experiments are coming.
“The improvements we are making in understanding speech and language are driving a paradigm shift — moving away from a world where we’ve had to understand computers to one where computers understand humans. We call this conversational AI,” Shum said in press release.
In addition to new Cognitive Services, the company announced expansions to the Microsoft Bot Framework, a platform for creating intelligent “robots” within apps and services. Since the platform’s launch in 2016, more than 130,000 developers have signed on, and now Microsoft is enhancing the platform with “Adaptive Cards” that can be used across multiple apps and platforms.
“Developers also can now publish to new channels including Skype for Business, Bing and Cortana, and implement Microsoft’s payment request API for fast and easy checkout with their bots,” Shum added.
Microsoft also injected its Azure cloud platform with a service called Batch AI Training, enabling developers to train their own deep neural networks using any framework they choose, such as Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit, Tensorflow, and Caffe. Developers can create their environment and run these models against multiple processors, multiple graphics chips, and “eventually” field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), which are integrated circuits that can be configured by developers.
Finally, Microsoft announed a new Office feature called Presentation Translator. Available in Powerpoint, it uses the company’s AI capabilities to translate PowerPoint presentations between multiple languages in real-time. Attendees of a meeting can use a link generated by Presentation Generator to see the translation on their device. It joins Powerpoint Designer and Office Researcher, two previous features that used the company’s AI knowledge.
Overall, these changes don’t have much immediate impact on consumers. However, Microsoft hopes that its Cognitive Services and Bot Framework will allow the design of next-generation applications that use AI to interact more intuitively with users. Only time can reveal the wisdom in this approach, but the company’s continued commitment in these areas, which were first detailed in-depth during last year’s Build conference, shows the company expects big things from these technically complex initiatives.