Microsoft’s annual developer conference, Microsoft Build 2019 kickstarted yesterday at Seattle, US. The three-day long conference focused on empowering developers of all kinds, from experienced computer scientists to tech beginners with big ideas. The company shared platforms, tools, and services that are making it easier to create and innovate using AI and mixed reality. Here’s a peek at some of the event’s highlights:
- The latest Microsoft Edge built on Chromium OSS will make it easier to collect, organize and share content, and give users additional privacy controls to make their own decisions about how third parties can track.
- Starbucks turns to technology to brew up a more personal connection with its customers including managing predictive maintenance on coffee machines with Azure Sphere, giving personalized recommendations to customers via the Starbucks mobile app with reinforcement learning on Azure, and powering digital traceability efforts to track coffee beans from farm to store with Azure blockchain service.
- Fluid Framework, a web-based platform expected to be available later this year that will give teams new ways to create together, enabling content to be deconstructed and reconstructed into modular components and allowing intelligent agents to work alongside people to co-author, provide photo suggestions, translate data and more.
- Microsoft’s conversational AI and machine learning platform pioneered by Semantic Machines, which Microsoft acquired in May 2018 showcased a calendaring application of the technology that can make organizing your day with an intelligent assistant a more natural and powerful experience, and the same technology will eventually be integrated into conversational AI moving forward across all of Microsoft’s products and services.
- With AI in Microsoft 365 and Office 365, it makes people’s workday more productive and Ideas in Word for Word Online, which can help you easily design and present polished documents, and Microsoft Search, a new enterprise search experience that applies AI technology from Bing and deep personalized insights surfaced by the Microsoft Graph.
- The Sarcos Guardian S, a small robotic visual inspection platform, is designed for exactly those scenarios: searching for cracks in industrial pipelines, finding people trapped in unstable buildings, sensing whether hazardous gases at an accident site could pose a safety risk to first responders. The first component in this platform is now available in a limited preview program.
- Microsoft Graph data connect is a service that helps organizations bring together productivity data from the Microsoft Graph with their own business data securely, providing new opportunities to create insight-powered apps while helping address the challenges of moving and managing large amounts of data.
- New tools and capabilities in Azure AI for developers and data scientists include Ink Recognizer, which lets developers embed digital ink recognition, an advanced speech-to-text capability that transcribes meeting conversations in real time so participants can fully engage in the discussion and know who said what later on.
- The new Azure Blockchain Service will empower developers, letting them deploy a fully managed consortium network with a few simple clicks and use built-in governance to add new members, set permissions and authenticate user applications. They’ll also be able to monitor their network’s health and activity.
- IoT Plug and Play offer a new open modeling language to help make this happen seamlessly, as well as a large ecosystem of partner-certified devices that simply work, with over a dozen certified devices now available.
For more details on all of these announcements and more visit, Microsoft Build 2019 website.
For more news and the latest updates follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
