14 DAY TRIAL // Apple has long been considered the most innovative company in the world, but Microsoft is continuously making the headlines these days with technologies that change the way people work and interact with devices, be they computers, smartphones, or laptops.
The latest such example is Redmond’s “conversation as a platform” effort that is meant to enhance communications between the man and the machine for the sole purpose of having artificial intelligence perform a series of tasks for the user.
Bots have been around for a while, but with artificial intelligence, Microsoft is trying to offer much more than that, and the recent Tay experiment is a sign of the direction that the company is heading to.
And during the first day of Build 2016, Redmond provided us with a quicker glimpse into the world of bots, revealing how this technology can work in a series of apps developed by the company and offering users the chance to try them on their own.
Bots in Skype
Skype is the first application to get bots, and together with Cortana, a user connected to the VoIP platform can easily perform things such as booking a hotel room in just a matter of seconds.
Bots can be accessed through messaging for the moment but will soon be available for audio and video calls too, Microsoft says, and they will let you “get things done directly in your Skype chats.”
The video demonstration presented by Microsoft at Build showed that Cortana and a Skype bot can search for hotels, make recommendations, book a room, and set calendar appointments with minimum user input. Bots can interact with each other, and businesses can create their own bots using a newly introduced framework.
This means that a developer can have a bot that can interact with others in a world that’s quickly migrating towards robots performing everything for users.
Bot preview
Microsoft already allows us to see how bots work in a new Skype client on Windows, Android, iPhone and iPad that comes with the Skype Both experience, but it’s worth noting that this feature only works in Australia, Canada, England, Ireland, India, New Zealand, Singapore, and the US.
Furthermore, Microsoft has announced a May hackaton that will provide more resources for bots and help developers build more bots and help expand this new world.
“It’s a simple concept, yet it’s very powerful in its impact. It’s about taking the power of human language and applying it more pervasively to all of our computing. That means we need to infuse into our computers and computing intelligence - intelligence about us and our context, and by doing so we think this can have as profound an impact as previous platforms,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella explained.