Where is Microsoft betting on AI?

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

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

However, as the recent development of artificial intelligence has created a rush for the industry, every technology company, including Microsoft, seems to be more inclined to complete more work through machine learning and cognitive computing.

Last year, the awareness and discussion about AI 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 developed its own chatbot, Tay. However, just 24 hours after Microsoft released Tay, the company had to deal with some inflammatory comments about racial discrimination.

It is now less than three days before 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 new hardware product releases. According to industry analysts, AI will not be emphasized as a key focus in this trip. Microsoft may focus on mining useful data and "smart" insights into artificial intelligence.

Microsoft senior manager Gregersen 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 revenue of US$92 billion in fiscal year 2016, of which the cloud computing and enterprise business unit's commercial cloud business contributed more than US$120 billion. billion dollars. Judging from Microsoft's Q3 financial report this year, Azure cloud service sales increased by 93% year-on-year.

The difference from other technology companies’ AI layout is that Microsoft AI is more “moisturizing and silent” with the help of cloud services. This can be reflected specifically in Microsoft Office services and intelligent assistant Cortana.

Office’s “AI” tentacles are everywhere

In fact, Microsoft’s Office software services are everywhere with “AI” tentacles.

Anyone who has used the Microsoft Office software suite should know that it now has many more features than before.

According to Gregersen, many deep AI functions are currently 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 PPT, and Bing's search results for this word will be displayed behind the scenes.

At the same time, PPT pictures can be edited on the smart cloud. AI can help users name the picture and so on. The Designer service can also view demo images to find faces and colors that can influence template design choices.

Gregersen said: Much of PowerPoint's "intelligent" design is intended to break "blank page syndrome." Many college students need to do different presentations in class, but struggle with the production of PPT. Microsoft's extensive AI design for PowerPoint will help them overcome this problem.

It is worth noting that Microsoft’s AI can also enrich presentations produced by PowerPoint in ways that most users cannot. It has a built-in cognitive vision system that can analyze photos and automatically generate Alt-Text. Although it is not possible to obtain high-frequency correct results based on the current level of intelligence, Gregersen said that the feedback results of this process will help improve the AI's ability to recognize future images.

Currently, Microsoft is further refining the AI ??functions of Office. When users create presentations related to processes, they can proactively suggest users to demonstrate the process in the form of diagrams.

In addition, Outlook’s “Focused Inbox” feature also uses cloud-based machine learning to provide support, which can prioritize important emails instead of displaying all information.

According to Gregersen, the Focused Inbox function is currently very 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, which is mainly reflected in writing assistants, such as spelling check and grammar. The current Word has fixed many obvious errors and can also provide a number of services such as style changes.

“In the past, it was difficult to do this without large language models and machine learning.” Gregersen said.

“Of course, ultimately all control lies in the hands of the user.” Gregersen added.

End-user control is also a common theme in all Microsoft's AI work, and Microsoft hopes that these Office tools can personalize operations for users. For example, changes that users often reject in Word may not be marked in subsequent writing.

Intelligent Assistant Cortana

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

Speaking of Cortana, everyone may be more familiar with it than Microsoft’s other AI sections. But on hundreds of millions of desktops around the world, few people still use Cortana's voice assistant service. Instead, most Windows users prefer text input 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, I have to remember to turn her off first."

Even though this is a naked fact and problem, it does not affect Microsoft's decision to turn Cortana off. It is positioned as a great tool for deploying AI. In the recent Windows Creators Update, Microsoft tried to plug Cortana into the installer and into competing platforms, and built iOS and Android versions of the app for it.

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 app on their iPhones, especially if they already have Apple's Siri voice assistant. Under the premise. Andrew is very optimistic about this.

“There are a considerable number of companies that have succeeded despite lacking mobile market share. Microsoft can lead this market through intelligence, intelligence and natural trend flow.” Andrew said externally.

For a long time, except for PC, 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 results in Cortana and opened a large number of programming interfaces on Azure. In a nutshell, third-party developers can leverage Microsoft's Cognitive Services API and a host of cloud services to build voice, image, and speech intelligence capabilities into their applications.

As Lei Feng.com previously reported, Microsoft recently released a "Chatbots on Bing.com" agenda. Developers can use Microsoft's Bot Framework to integrate their chatbots into Bing to help users find Nearby restaurants, movie times, and more. According to Lei Feng.com, this agenda will be announced at the Microsoft Bulid 2017 conference three days later.

When asked why Microsoft didn’t consolidate the AI ??capabilities behind Cortana, Andrew said he didn’t think it was the right approach. For Andrew, Cortana should focus on developing a set of capabilities rather than incrementally digging them out. "There is no doubt that Microsoft has always adopted a shared and open source attitude towards all products.

”