Microsoft is putting AI everywhere it can
Today’s AI is tomorrow’s taken for granted. It’s an insight you’d expect to hear from, maybe, Watson parent IBM, Alexa’s mom, Amazon, or even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg talking about “M.” The source, however is Microsoft Corporate VP for Microsoft AI & Research Group Andrew Shuman who was trying to set the stage for what should be some significant artificial intelligence announcements next week at Microsoft’s annual Build developer’s conference.
Microsoft has been in the artificial intelligence game for a long time, Shuman reminded me, especially from a Microsoft Research Standpoint.
They’ve used it to build speech processing and “We’re one of only two companies that created a world index of the web [Bing], which takes a lot of AI.” However, the recent surge in artificial intelligence developments has created an AI land-rush, where it seems like every tech company, including Microsoft, is promising to do more with machine learning and cognitive computing.
Last year, the conversation was all about AI chat bots. At Build 2016, CEO Satya Nadella promised them in everything from Skype to HoloLens. The company even launched its own Twitter chat bot, Tay, only to pull it hours later after someone used its burgeoning artificial intelligence against it. At this year’s Build Developer’s Conference, which kicks off on May 10 in Seattle, the AI focus is potentially less flashy and more focused on mining data for useful, actionable insights and subtle intelligence. “If I think about the kind of AI revolution that’s going on, it’s very much created by new increase in data being available and cloud service being able to run millions of computations,” said Shuman.
Microsoft certainly has the data, thanks to over 100 million Office 365 subscribers and, in OneDrive, it has the cloud-based services. Kirk Gregersen, Microsoft Partner Director of Program Management, told me the shift to the cloud has helped accelerate innovation. More importantly, though “The cloud is also capable of harnessing large quantities of data and signals.” That’s the kind of information that can power impressive AI feats.
One difference between Microsoft’s AI efforts and everyone else’s though, is that Microsoft’s are not so much in your face. They’re more like a little, anonymous factory robot, accepting requests and then zipping off to aisle 226 to find the exact blue blazer you didn’t even know you wanted. Take Office, for example. It’s already brimming with little AI touches. Anyone who has used Microsoft’s Office productivity suite knows that it has far more features than you could ever use. “There’s lots of deep functionality that, for years, has been challenging for users, even experienced ones. AI makes it easier to unearth,” said Gregersen.
In PowerPoint, for example, the Quick Starter uses AI to help find the right template based, sometimes, on a single word you type into one of the slides. Behind the scenes, it’s looking at the vast well of structured Bing data. The Designer service is also looking at presentation images, finding faces and even colors that can influence template design choices.
Much of the PowerPoint’s intelligence is designed to combat “blank page syndrome,” which Gregersen told me afflicts many students who must make a presentation. “Usually they just go to Wikipedia and just copy something,” he said, “We now help them with facts about topics and explanations about sourcing.” Microsoft’s AI can even enrich PowerPoint presentations in ways that most users don’t. A cognitive vision system analyzes photos and auto-generates Alt-Text for them.
It doesn’t always get it right, but Gregersen told me that even that feedback helps improve the AI’s ability to identify future images. The team is also refining AI that can tell when presentation text is a process-related and then suggest diagrams that illustrate that process.
