Microsoft Adds More AI-Based Features to Cortana, Office 365 and Bing
Microsoft is making several of its key apps and services smarter with the addition of new Artificial Intelligence-based features. The Cortana digital assistant, Office 365 service and Bing web search are now getting AI-powered updates, as the company announced on Wednesday, Dec. 13.
The company unveiled some of the key AI-based features coming to their software, via a press event in San Francisco earlier this week. The message that Microsoft seems to be trying to get across is that their huge AI push also works to improve features used every day, as ZDNet notes.
At Microsoft's AI Event, the company revealed Office Insights, a new feature that uses machine learning to analyze Excel spreadsheets to create trend charts and pivot tables.
"Data is incredibly valuable, but it's only valuable when you're actually able to extract insights from it," Microsoft's Rob Howard said, as quoted by Engadget.
For Microsoft Word, the new Acronyms feature can study an organization's documents, emails, and presentations to learn the acronyms and abbreviations unique to that company. Outlook is also getting an AI-powered feature soon, one which could highlight action items in emails to help users skim and respond faster.
A new Design tool for PowerPoint could soon whip up a full presentation from a simple bullet list of talking points, based on what it learned about an organization. All these features work online.
The cloud has actually really accelerated our progress," Howard added, noting how online access to an organization's data has pushed the envelope of what Microsoft can deliver to its users through AI.
Bing, Microsoft's own search service, can now learn to present two opposing viewpoints on a controversial question. It will also know which ones have undisputed, agreed-upon, factual answers, and present those as query results.
The Cortana digital assistant, meanwhile, will be getting an update that lets it sort emails and provide summaries of the longer or more important messages, whether they come from Outlook, Gmail or other email sources.
