Cortana Intelligence Suite
Cortana, it would seem, is about to get a lot more useful thanks to bots, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Microsoft is formalising this by launching the Cortana Intelligence Suite, which is made up of two parts: Microsoft Cognitive Services, a set of APIs that let computers understand humans in more natural terms, and the Microsoft Bot Framework, which lets developers and companies create and manage bots more easily.
All of these software services are built on the back of Azure, Microsoft's cloud platform, and work alongside Office, Windows, and every other piece of software that Microsoft currently makes.
This is important as it means that businesses who have already bought into Microsoft services can quickly and easily harness Cortana and bots, increasing their productivity in the process. For Microsoft, this is a big win on every single level.
Life changing applications
But the applications for this software don't end there. One of the demos that Microsoft showed focused on a blind software engineer who works for the company in London. Thanks to Cortana, artificial intelligence, and a specially made pair of glasses, he can 'see' things as the computer identifies them and describes them. The accompanying video was moving and, for Microsoft, a good way to show how its technology can really change people's lives.
Google has touted its artificial intelligence smarts in relation to Google Now and, in some ways, it is an impressive technology that can track and predict what the user will be doing. Siri, in iOS 9, also picked up some deeper learning capabilities. But neither rivals Cortana and the aggressiveness with which Microsoft is constantly updating the assistant to deal with new tasks.
This obviously has big applications in the consumer world, but the enterprise world is where Microsoft can really hammer this home. No other company – not Amazon, not Google, not Oracle, not Box – has the level of data, the virtual assistant, or the operating system to do what Microsoft is doing and this is why Cortana is such a key part of Microsoft's long-term appeal with businesses.
Windows 10 is now on 270 million PCs and businesses are taking to the operating system at an unprecedented rate, according to Microsoft, which means the data set from which all of the intelligent services can draw will only grow bigger and bigger over time making them more and more useful.
Data makes the world go round
One of the goals that Microsoft outlined at Build was to enable users to interact with their computers using natural language. This is achieved by collecting vast amounts of natural language data which is then processed, broken down, and learnt from. Microsoft now has this data and is using it to improve Cortana and its other services.
For the first time in a very long time, Microsoft is leading in a way that Apple, Google, and almost every other big technology firm simply cannot do, and it is this which will firmly cement Redmond's place as the war over who gets the most users, the cleverest software, and ultimately the biggest share of the profits continues.
