Microsoft: The Dawn of the Cognitive Services Era

We’ve also entered into a groundbreaking, non-profit public partnership: co-chairing the Partnership on AI. Joining us are Amazon, DeepMind/Google, Facebook, and IBM. This is a new non-profit organization charged with identifying and addressing challenges and opportunities in an open and inclusive manner.

This is where the edge of time catches up to Science Fiction. Anyone can talk to any device. Microsoft calls this new paradigm, the Conversational User Interface, or CUI. In the past, we designed based on the input of mice and keyboards and the display characteristics of consoles.  Now you can design around speech, snapshot images, and visual interpretations of real-world actions. Bots will independently trigger actions by interpreting real life circumstances. Cognitive agents can understand what is happening and make decisions. This goes beyond policy management. Cognitive Bots will take action triggered, not by policy you specified, but more significantly, the actions learned in the deep neural network.

In the near future, mundane, routine tasks will be managed by your digital personal assistant and a plethora of friendly Bots. Potentially any connected device, via commands sent into the cloud, could understand and follow your direction. This is the next era of communication technology, and it’s easy to begin to tap the potential now. The pioneers will capitalize on the multitude of opportunities of this new frontier.