Microsoft's layout of artificial intelligence, bet on these two killers?
(Original title: Microsoft layout AI, bet on these two killers?)
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Lei Feng: According to today, the AI ​​topic has become commonplace. IBM, Amazon, Facebook, Google and other technology giants have laid out here. As we all know, Microsoft is also well-positioned for AI.
"Now I am afraid there is no technology company that does not do artificial intelligence."
Dr. Shen Xiangyang, Microsoft’s executive vice president of global operations, Microsoft’s artificial intelligence, and Microsoft’s Research Division, said in an exclusive interview with Business School.
"Microsoft's Bing search is one of the world's two major 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 the recent development of artificial intelligence has allowed the industry to form a beachhead, every technology company, including Microsoft, seems to be more inclined to do more with machine learning and cognitive computing.
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Last year, the focus of AI's cognition and discussion focused on chatbots. At Microsoft Build 2016, Microsoft CEO Nadera also promised to shift focus from Skype to Hololens. The company even has a self-developed chat robot, Tay. However, just 24 hours after Microsoft released Tay, the company had to deal with some of its published inflammatory comments involving racial discrimination.
Now that it has been less than 3 days since the beginning of the Microsoft Build 2017 conference, the industry can not help but guess what the Microsoft will focus on this year's conference, and related new hardware releases. According to industry analysts, this line of AI will not be emphasized as a key point, and Microsoft will focus on tapping useful data, as well as "intelligent" insight into artificial intelligence.
According to Microsoft senior manager Gregersen, the shift to the cloud will further help Microsoft accelerate innovation. "More importantly, the cloud can also carry large amounts of data and signals." According to Microsoft's financial report, Microsoft had a total of US$92 billion in revenue in fiscal year 2016, of which Cloud Computing and Enterprise Business Cloud contributed more than US$12 billion. From Microsoft's Q3 financial report this year, the Azure cloud service sales increased by 93% year-on-year.
The difference with other technology companies in arranging AI is that Microsoft AI has been assisted by cloud services and appears to be even more "smooth." Specifically from the Cortana Microsoft Office Services and Assistant to reflect.
Office's "AI" tentacle is everywhere
In fact, Microsoft's Office software services are spread throughout the "AI" tentacle.
Anyone who has used the Microsoft Office software suite should know that it now has more features than before.
According to Gregersen, there are many deep AI features in the Microsoft Office software suite. For example, in PowerPoint, Quick Starter can use AI to help users find the correct template. Users simply enter a word in PPT and Bing can present search results for this word behind the scenes.
Image Source: Microsoft
At the same time, PPT picture editing can also be performed on the smart cloud, AI can help users name this picture and so on. The Designer service can also view demo images to find faces and colors that can affect the template design choices.
Gregersen said that most of the "smart" design of PowerPoint is intended to break the "blank page syndrome." Many college students need to make different presentations, but suffer from the production of PPT. Microsoft's large number of AI designs for PowerPoint will help them overcome this problem.
It's worth noting that Microsoft's AI can enrich PowerPoint presentations in a way that most users can't. Inside is a built-in cognitive vision system that analyzes photos and automatically generates Alt-Text. Although according to the current level of intelligence can not get the correct results at high frequency, but Gregersen said the feedback results of this process will help improve the AI ​​ability to identify future images.
Currently, Microsoft is further refining the Office's AI capabilities. When users make presentations related to processes, they can actively suggest that users demonstrate this process graphically.
Image Source: Microsoft
In addition, Outlook's "Focused Inbox" feature also uses cloud-based machine learning to provide support, it can give priority to display important messages instead of displaying all information.
According to Gregersen, the Focused Inbox feature is particularly popular in Outlook's Andriod and iOS versions.
At the same level, Word users have been using Microsoft AI-based services for many years. This is mainly reflected in the writing assistants, such as spell checking and grammar. Now Word has fixed a number of obvious mistakes, but also provides services such as multiple style changes.
"In the past, it was difficult to do this because there was no large language model and machine learning," Gregersen said.
"Of course, all the control is ultimately in the hands of the user," Gregersen added. End-user control is also a common theme for all AI work at Microsoft. Microsoft hopes that these Office tools will enable users to perform personalized operations. For example, changes that users often decline in Word may not be marked in subsequent writing.
Assistant Cortana
On the other hand, Microsoft's AI work also has a strong support - Assistant Cortana. Although Cortana currently looks a bit irritated, Microsoft has never reduced its investment and attention.
Speaking of Cortana, everyone may be more familiar with it than Microsoft's other AI sections. However, Cortana's voice assistant service is still rarely used on hundreds of millions of desktops around the world. Instead, most Windows users are more accustomed to typing in text to get answers to questions.
Andrew said that people are still not used to talking to their computers. For Andrew, "Every time I talk about Cortana, remember to turn her off first."
Even if it is a naked fact and difficult problem, it does not affect Microsoft's positioning of Cortana as a big weapon for its layout of AI. In the recent Windows Creators Update, Microsoft tried to insert Cortana into the installation program and build a competitive platform, and build iOS and Android versions of APP applications 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 Cortana applications on the iPhone, especially if they already have the Apple Siri voice assistant. Andrew is very optimistic about this.
"There is a considerable number of companies that have succeeded in the absence of mobile market share. Microsoft can lead this market through smart, intelligent and natural trend flows," Andrew said.
All along, Cortana has no dedicated hardware main body other than the PC, making it difficult to become a household AI product. However, the industry has speculated that Microsoft may release a Cortana-based speaker product at Build 2017.
Andrew also said that Microsoft has invested a lot of research in Cortana and has opened a large number of programming interfaces on Azure. In a nutshell, third-party developers can use Microsoft's cognitive services API and a large number of cloud services to build voice, image, and voice intelligence in their applications.
For instance, Lei Fengnet reported that Microsoft recently released a "Chatbots on Bing.com" agenda. Developers can use Microsoft's Bot Framework to integrate their own chatbots into Bing to help users find nearby restaurants and movies. Time and so on. According to Lei Feng Network (public number: Lei Feng network) understand that this agenda will be announced in three days after the Microsoft Bulid 2017 conference.
When asked why Microsoft did not consolidate the AI ​​capabilities behind Cortana, Andrew said he did not think it was the right thing to do. For Andrew, Cortana should focus on the development of a set of capabilities rather than gradually digging. "There is no doubt that Microsoft has always adopted a shared and open source attitude towards all products."
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