Microsoft Build 2019 news wrap-up – everything you need to know

Microsoft Build kicked off in Seattle earlier this week, unveiling a whole host of news and tools to help empower developers from around the world. From making it easier to create innovative AI and mixed reality solutions, to helping people and organisations achieve more with intelligent cloud tools, there are plenty of highlights from the week for tech fans to sink their teeth into.

Please visit the Official Microsoft Blog post for more information.

Photo of woman holding smartphone and screenshots of her calendaring activity in the background
A woman engages in a smooth, back-and-forth dialogue with an intelligent assistant that helps her juggle upcoming appointments on her calendar.

Intelligent agents
Learn more about Microsoft’s vision for intelligent agents that leverage breakthroughs in conversational AI and machine learning pioneered by Semantic Machines, which Microsoft acquired in May 2018. Build showcased a calendaring application of the technology that can make organising your day with an intelligent assistant a more natural and powerful experience. The same technology will eventually be integrated into our conversational AI moving forward across all of Microsoft’s products and services.

Microsoft Edge
Microsoft Edge built on Chromium OSS has received new features that will make it easier to collect, organise and share content, while providing additional privacy controls to make your own decisions about how third parties can track you.

Fluid Framework
Fluid Framework, a web-based platform expected to be available later this year, 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.

Everyday AI
See how more everyday uses of AI in Microsoft 365 and Office 365 can help improve productivity, including 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.
Photo of snake-like robot with two lights on the front
An experimental version of the Sarcos Guardian S, a robot that can be used in disaster recovery or for industrial inspections, uses Microsoft’s autonomous systems platform. (Photo by Dan DeLong)

Autonomous systems
Learn more about a new platform that can help make it easier for companies to create autonomous systems. Examples include a robot that can help in life-threatening situations, a drone that can inspect remote equipment, or systems that can autonomously calibrate factory equipment. The first component in this platform is now available in a limited preview program.

Microsoft Graph
Learn what developers will be able to do with Microsoft Graph data connect, a service that helps organisations 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.

Azure AI
Learn about the new tools and capabilities in Azure AI for developers and data scientists, including 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.

Photo of Starbucks barista smiling and making an espresso drinkTechnology is helping Starbucks and their baristas deliver great customer experiences (Photo courtesy of Starbucks)

Starbucks
Technology is helping Starbucks and their baristas deliver great customer experiences, including managing predictive maintenance on coffee machines with Azure Sphere. Starbucks customers can also receive personalised recommendations thanks to reinforcement learning on Azure, along with powering digital traceability efforts to track coffee beans from farm to store with Azure blockchain service.

Azure Blockchain Service
See how 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
One of the greatest challenges customers face when deploying Internet of Things solutions broadly is connecting their IoT devices to the cloud. IoT Plug and Play offers 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 information on all of these announcements and more, please visit the Microsoft Build 2019 website.

Lead photo by Brian Smale

 


Lead photo by Brian Smale

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