Prediction | Microsoft is betting on these two killer weapons in its AI layout?

“Nowadays, I’m afraid there is no technology company that says it doesn’t work on artificial intelligence.”

Dr. Harry Shum, Microsoft's global executive vice president and head of Microsoft's artificial intelligence and research divisions, said this in an exclusive interview with Business School.

"Microsoft's Bing search is one of the world's two largest search engines, which requires more AI to support this work," said Andrew Shuman, senior vice president of Microsoft's Artificial Intelligence and Microsoft Research Division.

However, as recent advances in artificial intelligence have created a beachhead in the industry, every tech company, including Microsoft, seems more inclined to get more work done through machine learning and cognitive computing.

Image credit: AP/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK

Last year, the focus of AI awareness and discussion was on chatbots. At the Microsoft Build 2016 conference, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also promised to shift the focus from Skype to Hololens. The company even developed its own chatbot, Tay. However, just 24 hours after Microsoft released Tay, the company had to deal with some inflammatory comments involving racial discrimination.

Now, less than 3 days away from the start of Microsoft Build 2017, the industry can't help but speculate on what Microsoft will focus on at this year's conference, as well as related hardware new product releases, etc. According to industry analysts, AI will not be emphasized as a key point this time, and Microsoft may focus on mining useful data and "smart" insights into artificial intelligence.

Gregersen, a senior manager at Microsoft, believes that the shift to the cloud will further help Microsoft accelerate innovation. "More importantly, the cloud can also carry a large amount of data and signals." According to Microsoft's financial report, Microsoft had a total revenue of $92 billion in fiscal year 2016, of which the cloud computing and enterprise business cloud business contributed more than $12 billion. According to Microsoft's Q3 financial report this year, Azure cloud service sales increased by 93% year-on-year.

Unlike other technology companies, Microsoft AI is more "silent" with the help of cloud services, which can be seen in Microsoft Office services and intelligent assistant Cortana.

Office's "AI" is everywhere

In fact, Microsoft's Office software services are full of "AI" tentacles.

Anyone who has used the Microsoft Office software suite knows that it has far more features than ever before.

According to Gregersen, many deep AI functions have been added to the Microsoft Office software suite. For example, in PowerPoint, Quick Starter can use AI to help users find the right template. Users only need to enter a word in the PPT, and Bing search results about this word will be presented behind the scenes.

At the same time, PPT picture editing can be performed on the smart cloud, and AI can help users name the picture, etc. The Designer service can also view the presentation images to find faces and colors that can influence the template design selection.

Gregersen said: Most of the "intelligent" design of PowerPoint is intended to break the "blank page syndrome". Many college students need to make different presentations in class, but they are troubled by the production of PPT. Microsoft's extensive AI design of PowerPoint will help them overcome this problem.

It’s worth noting that Microsoft’s AI can also enrich PowerPoint presentations in ways that most users can’t. There’s a cognitive vision system built into it that analyzes photos and automatically generates Alt-Text. Although it’s not yet able to get the right results with high frequency based on its current intelligence, Gregersen said that feedback from the process will help improve the AI’s ability to recognize future images.

Currently, Microsoft is further refining the AI ​​function of Office. When users make presentations related to processes, it can actively suggest users to demonstrate the process in the form of diagrams.

Additionally, Outlook’s “Focused Inbox” feature is powered by cloud-based machine learning, which prioritizes important emails instead of displaying all messages.

According to Gregersen, the Focused Inbox feature is particularly popular in the Android and iOS versions of Outlook.

At the same level, Word users have been using Microsoft AI-based services for many years, mainly in the writing assistant, such as spelling check and grammar. Word now fixes many obvious errors and can also provide services such as multiple style changes.

“This has been difficult to do in the past without large language models and machine learning,” Gregersen said.

"Of course, ultimately all control is in the hands of the user," Gregersen added. End-user control is also a common theme in all of Microsoft's AI work, and Microsoft hopes that these Office tools can be personalized for users. For example, changes that users often reject in Word may not be marked in subsequent writing.

Cortana

On the other hand, Microsoft's AI work has another strong support - the intelligent assistant Cortana. Although Cortana seems to be a little unpopular at present, Microsoft has never reduced its investment and attention to it.

Speaking of Cortana, people may be more familiar with it than other AI sections of Microsoft. However, on hundreds of millions of desktops around the world, few people still use Cortana's voice assistant service. Instead, most Windows users are more accustomed to getting answers to questions through text input.

Andrew said that people are still not used to talking to their computers. For Andrew, "Every time I talk to Cortana, I have to remember to turn her off first."

Even though this is a naked fact and a problem, it has not affected Microsoft's positioning of Cortana as a powerful tool for its AI layout. In the recent Windows Creators Update, Microsoft tried to insert Cortana into the installer and implant it into competing platforms, and built iOS and Android versions of the APP for this purpose.

On the mobile side, although Microsoft's Windows Phone has a negligible market share, this does not mean that no one will install the Cortana application on the iPhone, especially if they already have Apple's Siri voice assistant. Andrew is very optimistic about this.

"There are quite a few companies that have succeeded despite lacking a mobile market share. Microsoft can lead this market through intelligence, smartness, and natural trend flow," Andrew said.

Until now, Cortana has not had a dedicated hardware host other than PC, so it is difficult for it to become a household AI product. However, the industry speculates that Microsoft may release a speaker product based on Cortana at the Build 2017 conference.

Andrew also said that Microsoft has invested a lot of research results in Cortana and opened a large number of programming interfaces on Azure. In a nutshell, third-party developers can use Microsoft's cognitive service API and a large number of cloud services to build voice, image and voice intelligence functions in their own applications.

As Leifeng.com reported previously , Microsoft recently released a "Chatbots on Bing.com" agenda, where developers can use Microsoft's Bot Framework to integrate their chatbots into Bing to help users find nearby restaurants, movie show times, etc. According to Leifeng.com, this agenda will be announced at the Microsoft Build 2017 conference in three days.

When asked why Microsoft doesn't consolidate the AI ​​capabilities behind Cortana, Andrew said he doesn't think it's the right approach. For Andrew, Cortana should focus on developing a full set of capabilities rather than tapping into them piecemeal. "There's no doubt that Microsoft has always taken a sharing and open source attitude towards all its products."

Via mashable , compiled by Leifeng.com