Artificial Intelligence is rapidly impacting the way business processes are run. Microsoft is aiming to help brands get one step ahead in this paradigm shift.
Microsoft is aiming to demystify AI and help more brands and marketers integrate it into their daily business processes. At an event in San Francisco, California, Microsoft showcased a range of “real world” customer use cases of artificial intelligence and announced several new AI products and initiatives. These are:
1. New conversational AI tools
As part of the Azure Bot Service and Microsoft Bot Framework, the new tools promise the capacity to “build an enterprise-grade virtual assistant in a matter of minutes.”
2. Azure Cognitive Services containers
Through this, Microsoft is enabling developers to add capabilities “such as object detection, vision recognition, and language understanding—into their applications without having direct AI or data science skills or knowledge.”
3. AI capabilities for Power BI
Microsoft is integrating more machine learning and the capacity to create machine learning models into Power BI. The company says that users won’t need to “write a single line of code.”
4. Neural text-to-speech service
This tool aims to create a digital speech that is almost “indistinguishable from recordings of people.”
Microsoft’s Corporate VP of AI Lili Cheng said earlier: “We strongly believe our customers should own and enrich their customer relationships and insights. Therefore, any virtual assistant provides complete control of the user experience to our customers and partners. The name, voice, and personality can be changed to suit the organization’s needs. Our virtual assistant solution accelerator simplifies the creation of your own assistant enabling you to get started in minutes.”
The company also released guidelines for responsible bot and AI development: “The field of conversational AI isn’t new to me or to Microsoft. In fact, I’ve been working on conversational interfaces since 1995 when we developed Comic Chat, a graphical chat service that was embedded in an early version of Internet Explorer. The lessons we’ve learned from those experiences, and from our more recent work with tools such as Cortana and Zo, have helped us shape these guidelines, which we follow in our own efforts to develop responsible and trusted bots.”