Microsoft unveiled a new set of cognitive services at Build 2016, as part of its Cortana Intelligence Suite the latter also includes a new Microsoft Bot Framework and machine learning services. To power the new conversational themes, Microsoft is applying related “cognitive services” for requirements such as speech and speaker recognition. ![]() Establishing sufficient context and trust to establish confidence that automated conversation participants (e.g., bots) are going to actually do what users intend, however, has been a longstanding challenge Microsoft is addressing the challenge with a variety of new intelligence-related technologies. “Intelligence infused into all interactions:” bots have been around for decades, and there has been considerable research on related topics such as intelligent agents. ![]() Digital assistants invoke and dismiss bots when appropriate, and users can also directly invoke bots. “Bots are the new apps digital assistants are the meta apps:” the basic idea is that bots are services focused on a specific application context, and are enlisted to complete functions, using only the details required for those functions, and are then dismissed, while digital assistants such as Cortana are omnipresent personal assistants with secure access to many facets of your digital profile and activities. Natural language is also used in Skype, extending text chat to interact with bots. “Human language is the new UI:” with speech recognition services and digital assistants such as Cortana, Microsoft’s tool and platform architects believe the best user interface for many scenarios is no user interface, with users simply using speech to enlist devices and services into purposeful activities. Three main themes were highlighted (quoting from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s comments during the Build 2016 day 1 keynote): ![]() Microsoft presented an overview of its new Conversations as a Platform vision during the Build 2016 keynotes (which you can view at this Channel 9 page). In this post, we’ll provide an overview of the new conversational features and summarize with some thoughts about how they’re likely to accelerate Office 365’s market momentum. The company unveiled a new Conversations as a Platform vision at its recent Build and Envision conferences, for example, and some related capabilities are already available in Office 365 and Skype. Microsoft has leveraged many of the market dynamics that have recently made Slack a team communications phenomenon (see our recent post, How Slack Complements Office 365 - Spoiler Alert: As a Migration Source for a Slack overview).
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