Bottom Line

AI is very real and here. Microsoft is quite serious about bringing this to mainstream.

Summary

The sole focus of Satya’s keynote was the vision of AI everywhere, most notably, through Cortana, in Microsoft’s core cloud offerings including Azure, O365 and Dynamics. In fact that was basically it. The entire hour centered on this vision of “Democratizing AI”.

There were a number of very cool things presented most notably a Hololens app for a home remodeling project tied in to Pinterest where Cotrana used this to determine your decorating taste. Very Star Trek, but very practical and apparently something coming to the real world very soon.

Other highlights include

  • If you hated the Windows Paper Clip from back in the day you might really hate the new personal assistant infused with AI to make sure you exercise, eat right and keep up with your work.
  • O365 and Dynamics infused with AI to increase productivity and enhance the customer experience.
  • Awkward appearance by Deion Sanders for a fantasy football app demo as well as some on stage presentations from various AI/super computer teams.
  • War and Peace translated in under 2 seconds with new FPGA board
  • All of Wikipedia translated in .9 seconds when full power of Azure employed

Notes

Below are my raw notes for those who are interested:

Democratizing AI

  • empower every person with tools to solve big problems
  • handwriting recognition
  • holographic computer
  • Office apps with intelligence

What is lacking is the ability to make sense of all the data being generated

Pillars

  • Agents – Cortana
  • Apps
  • Services
  • Infrastructure

Cortana

  • Reminder app to be proactive
  • Health monitoring and insights
  • To do list
  • Keep track of key metrics
  • Sticky notes

Applications

  • Neural net typing to improve speed
  • O365
  • Skype Translator
  • Word – spelling, grammar, context
  • MyAnalytics
  • Dynamics 365 – relationship assistant (Ships 11/16) – changes that are happening with customer in news or LinkedI
  • Customer support – tech support agent (bot) can escalate to real person. Bot (virtual assistant) can look up trouble shooting info for rep

Services

  • Cortana intelligence
  • Machine learning (bot framework) **convenient way for user to interact. Bot needs conversational understanding. NFL fantasy football bot coming. Deion Sanders makes appearance on stage. Cortona predicts Saints win on Monday Night Football.
  • Cognitive services apis – uber driver and rider recognition and verification
  • Cognitive services apis – Pintrest -Lowes – see remodel at the store via Hololens – Cortana deep neural network and deep learning to match product design at Lowes. The analytics based on the dwell time in the home decor demo very interesting

Infrastructure

  • Azure -CPU scale – AI super computer in cloud (FPGA) -deployed in hyper scale data center – super charged board. Very cool translation demo. War and Peace translated in two seconds. All of Wikipedia translated in less than a tenth of second if full hyper scale used
  • Global
  • Trusted
  • Intelligent
  • From silicon to cloud