Microsoft incorporating AI into everything they do

Microsoft is ramping up AI into everything they do…

…from Skype for Business, to Cortana and Office 365 Graph and deep into Azure through advanced machine learning.

A few years ago, it was hard to think of a commonly used technology tool that used AI. In a few years, it will be hard to imagine any technology that doesn’t tap into the power of AI.

Thanks to the convergence of three major forces — increased computing power in the cloud, powerful algorithms that run on deep neural networks and access to massive amounts of data the world is rapidly starting to realise the capability of AI.

The mainstream popularity of AI is new, but Microsoft’s investment in AI isn’t. Microsoft have been creating the building blocks for the current wave of AI breakthroughs for more than two decades, through groundbreaking research in areas such as machine learning, speech recognition, and computer vision and image recognition.

Now it’s 2017

This year, Microsoft are in a unique position of being able to use those decades of research breakthroughs, along with access to data through the Microsoft Graph and the computing power of our Azure cloud, as the basis for a new generation of tools and products from which developers and customers can benefit.

This extends from improvements in collaboration, live language translation in Skype for Business and Machine Learning and Behavioural analytics for security and compliance solutions.

One great example of this is a new Presentation Translator add-in for Microsoft PowerPoint, that uses the company’s Translation APIs to embed real-time transcripts, translated into the language of the viewer’s choice, right inside and live from PowerPoint presentations.

Rob Quickenden, Chief Strategy Officer at Cisilion