Today, AI topics have become commonplace. IBM, Amazon, Facebook, Google and other technology giants have been deployed here, and the actions are one after another. As everyone knows, Microsoft has a long-term layout in AI.
"Now I am afraid that no technology company says that it does not do artificial intelligence."
Dr. Shen Xiangyang, the global executive vice president of Microsoft, and the head of Microsoft's artificial intelligence and Microsoft research division, said in an exclusive interview with Business School.
"Microsoft's Bing search is one of the top two search engines in the world, which requires more AI to support this work," said Andrew Shuman, senior vice president of Microsoft Artificial Intelligence and Microsoft Research.
However, due to the recent development of artificial intelligence, the industry has formed a rushing situation. Every technology company, including Microsoft, seems to be more inclined to do more work through machine learning and cognitive computing.
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Last year, the focus on AI awareness and discussion focused on chatbots. At the Microsoft Build 2016 conference, Microsoft CEO Nadella also promised to shift the focus from Skype to Hololens. The company even researched a chat robot - Tay. However, after Microsoft released Tay in just 24 hours, the company had to conduct a public relations deal with some of the inflammatory comments on racial discrimination.
Now that it has been less than three days since the Microsoft Build 2017 conference, the industry can't help but speculate on what Microsoft will focus on at this year's conference, as well as related hardware releases. According to industry analysts, this trip AI will not be emphasized as a key point, Microsoft will focus on mining useful data, as well as "intelligent" insights into artificial intelligence.
Microsoft senior manager Gregersen believes that the transition to the cloud will further help Microsoft accelerate innovation. "More importantly, the cloud can carry a lot of data and signals." According to Microsoft's financial report, Microsoft had a total of $92 billion in revenue in FY16, of which the cloud computing and enterprise business cloud business contributed more than $12 billion. From Microsoft's Q3 earnings report this year, Azure cloud service sales increased by 93% year-on-year.
The difference with other technology companies' layout AI is that Microsoft AI has become more "smooth and quiet" with the help of cloud services. This can be seen in the Microsoft Office service and the assistant Cortana.
Office's "AI" tentacle is everywhere
In fact, Microsoft's Office software services are all over the "AI" tentacles.
Anyone who has used the Microsoft Office suite of software should know that it now has more features than before.
According to Gregersen, many deep AI features have been added to the Microsoft Office software suite. For example, in PowerPoint, Quick Starter can use AI to help users find the correct template. Users only need to enter a word in the PPT, and Bing can present Bing's search results for this word.
Image source: Microsoft
At the same time, PPT picture editing can be performed on the smart cloud, AI can help users name this picture and so on. The Designer service can also view the demo image to find faces and colors that can influence the design choices of the template.
Gregersen said: Most of the "smart" design of PowerPoint is designed to break the "blank page syndrome." Many college students need to do different PresentaTIon in class, but suffer from the production of PPT. Microsoft's extensive AI design for 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. A cognitive vision system is built into it to analyze photos and automatically generate Alt-Text. Although high-frequency correct results are not available based on the current level of intelligence, Gregersen said that the feedback from this process will help improve the ability of AI to identify future images.
At present, Microsoft is further refining the AI ​​function of Office. When users create Process-related PresentaTIon, they can actively suggest users to demonstrate this process in a graphical manner.
In addition, Outlook's "Focused Inbox" feature also uses cloud-based machine learning to provide support, which prioritizes the display of important messages rather than displaying all of them.
According to Gregersen, the Focused Inbox feature is very popular in the Andriod and iOS versions of Outlook.
On the same level, Word users have been using Microsoft AI-based services for many years, mainly in writing assistants such as spell checking and grammar. Now Word has fixed many obvious errors and can provide 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 controls are in the hands of the users," Gregersen added. End-user control is also a common theme for all Microsoft AI work, and Microsoft hopes that these Office tools will be able to personalize the user. For example, changes that users often reject in Word may not be flagged in subsequent writing.
Assistant Cortana
On the other hand, Microsoft's AI work has a strong support - Assistant Assistant Cortana. Although Cortana seems to be a bit sloppy at the moment, Microsoft has never reduced its investment and attention.
Speaking of Cortana, you may be more familiar with it than other AI sections of Microsoft. However, on hundreds of millions of desktops around the world, there are still very few people using Cortana's voice assistant service. On the contrary, most Windows users are more accustomed to input the text to get the answer to the question.
Andrew said that people are still not used to talking to their own computers. For Andrew, "Every time I talk about Cortana, remember to turn her off first."
Even if this is a naked fact and a problem, it does not affect Microsoft's positioning of Cortana as a great tool for its layout AI. In the recent Windows Creators Update, Microsoft tried to plug Cortana into the installer and plug it into a competing platform to build an iOS and Android version of the app.
On the mobile side, although Microsoft's Windows Phone market share is minimal, this does not mean that no one installs the Cortana application on the iPhone, especially if they already have the Apple Siri voice assistant. Andrew is very optimistic about this.
"There are a significant number of companies that have succeeded in the absence of a mobile market share. Microsoft can lead the market through smart, intelligent and natural trend flows," Andrew said.
For a long time, in addition to PCs, Cortana has not had a dedicated hardware body, so it is difficult to become a household AI product. However, the industry speculates that Microsoft may release a Cortana-based speaker product at the Build 2017 conference.
Andrew also said that Microsoft has invested a lot of research on Cortana and has opened a large number of programming interfaces on Azure. In a nutshell, third-party developers can leverage Microsoft's cognitive service APIs and a host of cloud services to build voice, image, and voice intelligence into their applications.
As Lei Feng.com reported earlier, Microsoft released a "Chatbots on Bing.com" agenda. Developers can use Microsoft's Bot Framework to integrate their chat bots into Bing to help users find nearby restaurants and movies. Time and so on. According to Lei Feng.com, this agenda will be announced at the Microsoft Bulid 2017 conference three days later.
When asked why Microsoft is not consolidating the AI ​​capabilities behind Cortana, Andrew said he doesn't think this is the right approach. For Andrew, Cortana should focus on the development of a set of capabilities rather than gradual mining. "There is no doubt that Microsoft has always adopted a shared and open source attitude towards all products."
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