Author: Microsoft Stories

Microsoft has created a new research lab aimed at creating more general-purpose learning systems based on artificial intelligence. The lab will be located at Microsoft’s Redmond headquarters with a team of over 100 scientists working on AI, from various fields including natural language processing, learning and perception systems. “The group will tackle some of the hardest problems in AI and accelerate the integration of the latest AI advances into products and services that benefit customers and society, Harry Shum, Executive Vice President, Microsoft AI and Research Group wrote in an official blogpost.

India is a great place for innovation and there is a lot of opportunity for Indian firms and start-ups to work with Microsoft and develop cloud-based tools and platforms for a global marketplace, according to a Senior Official of the software giant. Alyssa Fitzpatrick, General Manager of Microsoft’s worldwide channel sales, on the sidelines of the ongoing annual partnership meet of Microsoft ‘Inspire’, said that some of the great things have been happening in the Indian market from an innovation perspective. She said that Microsoft was going to market with solution maps. “That’s gonna give us an opportunity to bring some of the innovation from India into those solution maps and really highlight it for the rest of the world’s consumption,” she said.

The Goods and Services Tax (GST) has forced and hastened technology adoption among SMEs. In a conversation with Economictimes.com, Amit Kumar, General Manager, Small and Mid-Market Solutions and Partners at Microsoft India said the, “opportunity is huge”. There is a huge focus on the entrepreneurial energy in the small and medium businesses. I think the biggest driver for me is the digital transformation. Today, businesses are thinking of how they can use technology to reach out to more customers, to connect and enable customers or to get their team or employees to respond better to customers. They are also looking at how they can reduce the cost of their operations, which means the products that people were selling are becoming different. I think the mindset of people who run businesses is changing – is becoming digital. That is what we see happening across the country,” he further said.

Microsoft has released a free iPhone app that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to tell the blind what is around them. If the phone is pointed at a park, the camera app, named Seeing AI, can describe how the scene looks like. Similarly, it can tell the amount of your restaurant bill or narrate just about anything it is pointed at.

Microsoft is putting its artificial intelligence technology to work to help the visually impaired. The company said that it’s releasing an iOS app called Seeing AI that uses an iPhone’s camera to tell people about objects in front of them. The app shows off Microsoft’s current capabilities in AI, while also addressing a group that the technology industry too often ignores.

Microsoft R Server 9.1 on Azure HDInsight is generally available. With this, it brings more power to the cloud on Spark 2.1 on HDInsight 3.6. Expert data scientists are adopting Advanced Analytics (AA) and Machine Learning (ML) at a rapid pace. This pace can be significantly increased when enterprise-grade AA and ML are available within environments where the customers’ data is, infusing intelligence into mission-critical applications is made much easier and, enterprises can turn to a single vendor to make the world of AA and ML synthesized and supported with the SLAs they have come to expect.

Microsoft Corp has kicked off Microsoft Inspire in Washington, D.C. where the company unveiled Microsoft 365, a new set of commercial offerings that draws from the best of the company’s commercial products across Office 365, Windows 10, and Enterprise Mobility + Security. Microsoft 365 is designed to empower all companies and all workers, recognizing that people are at the heart of digital transformation. It puts people at the center, giving them flexibility to work where and how they want, and giving them new ways to collaborate with others all while protecting company data

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella spoke to an audience at his keynote at Microsoft Inspire, where partners from 140 countries gathered this week in Washington, DC. Nadella said, “Don’t celebrate technology for technology’s sake. Our success is in our customers’ success.” This statement alone says a lot about how companies and businesses are transforming in the digital era. Technology impacts every aspect of our global society and economy, and Microsoft is a giant whose ecosystem drives local economies and creates massive growth in various sectors”. The Microsoft Inspire event was attended by the company’s partners gathered from across the globe, including 176 from India.

Microsoft has released an extension of its Visual Studio Code for Arduino. The latest development would bring joy for hardware makers that are using Arduino to build their IoT (Internet of Things) projects. With the arrival of the new Visual Studio Code Extension, Microsoft is apparently trying to address all the issues faced by IoT developers. The Visual Studio team at Microsoft had been closely worked with developers to learn their pain points while developing IoT projects and ultimately built an appropriate model.

Microsoft has launched an all-in-one software product called ‘Microsoft 365’, a new set that brings together Office 365, Windows 10, enterprise mobility and security for businesses. The company introduced two ‘Microsoft 365’ offerings, ‘Microsoft 365 Enterprise’ and ‘Microsoft 365 Business’.