Every year, Microsoft devotees head to Seattle for the company’s Build conference. During the two-day event, which overlaps with Google’s own developer conference which is held 840 miles south in Mountain View, California and starting Tuesday, Microsoft is expected to give updates about its Cortana voice assistant, its Azure “cloud” internet server rental business and, of course, its Windows software.
The event will be headlined by CEO Satya Nadella, whose priority since becoming CEO in 2014 has been to turn Microsoft from a hated competitor into a trusted partner. That approach is paying off, big time, helping make Microsoft one of the few companies ever to be valued at more than $1 trillion.
In the cognitive services category, Microsoft has revealed a new service category called “Decision.” The category is intended to bring new reasoning services for developers to take advantage of, enabling better decision-making. Included in this new category is a service called “Personalizer,” for example, which can give users customized recommendations through reinforcement learning.
Additionally, Azure Search is picking up new AI capabilities through the general availability of cognitive search. The new feature allows developers to use cognitive service algorithms in search to give their customers access to “new insights from their structured and unstructured content,” Microsoft said in a blog post announcing the feature.
Azure Machine Learning is also getting a boost through integration with Azure DevOps, automation advancements to make developing models easier, and a visual machine learning interface allows for no-code model creation.
Finally, IoT Plug and Play is a new open language that allows IoT devices to be easily connected to the cloud. “Previously, software had to be written specifically for the connected device it supported, limiting the scale of IoT deployments,” Microsoft says. “IoT Plug and Play will offer customers a large ecosystem of partner-certified devices that can connect quickly.”
The rest of the tech industry typically starts keynotes at 10 a.m. PT, but not Microsoft. The software giant is starting its event at 8:30 a.m. PT. on Monday May 6. Message received: Microsoft is super pumped to start the day.
You can watch on Microsoft’s Build website
