REDMOND, Wash., May 7, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Monday at Microsoft
Build 2018, Microsoft Corp.'s annual developer conference,
Microsoft leaders showcased new technologies to help every
developer be an AI developer, on Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365 and
across any platform. Building for AI is more important to
developers than ever, as technology continues to change the way
people live and work every day, across the cloud and across edge
devices.
"The era of the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge is upon
us," said Satya Nadella, CEO,
Microsoft. "These advancements create incredible developer
opportunity and also come with a responsibility to ensure the
technology we build is trusted and benefits all."
As part of Microsoft's commitment to trusted, responsible AI
products and practices, the company also today announced AI for
Accessibility, a new $25 million,
five-year program aimed at harnessing the power of AI to amplify
human capabilities for more than 1 billion people around the world
with disabilities. The program comprises grants, technology
investments and expertise, and will also incorporate AI for
Accessibility innovations into Microsoft Cloud services. It builds
on the success of the similar AI for Earth initiative.
Advancements in the intelligent edge and intelligent
cloud
Smart devices are proliferating in homes and businesses across
the globe, with more than 20 billion expected by 2020. These
devices are so smart, in fact, they are powering advanced ways to
see, listen, reason and predict, without constant connectivity to
the cloud. That is the intelligent edge, and it is opening
opportunities for consumers, businesses and entire industries, from
the operating room to the factory floor. Today Microsoft is
announcing new capabilities for developers to extend to the edge:
- Microsoft is open sourcing the Azure IoT Edge Runtime,
allowing customers to modify, debug and have more transparency and
control for edge applications.
- Custom Vision will now run on Azure IoT Edge, enabling
devices such as drones and industrial equipment to take critical
action quickly without requiring cloud connectivity. This is the
first Azure Cognitive Service to support edge deployment, with more
coming to Azure IoT Edge over the next several months.
- DJI, the world's biggest drone company, is partnering with
Microsoft to create a new SDK for Windows 10 PCs, and it has
also selected Azure as its preferred cloud provider to further its
commercial drone and SaaS solutions. The SDK will bring full flight
control and real-time data transfer capabilities to nearly
700M Windows 10 connected devices
globally. As part of the commercial partnership, DJI and Microsoft
will co-develop solutions leveraging Azure IoT Edge and Microsoft's
AI services to enable new scenarios across agriculture,
construction, public safety and more.
- Microsoft announced a joint effort with Qualcomm
Technologies, Inc. to create a vision AI developer kit running
Azure IoT Edge. This solution makes available the key hardware and
software required to develop camera-based IoT solutions. Developers
can create solutions that use Azure Machine Learning services and
take advantage of the hardware acceleration available via the
Qualcomm® Vision Intelligence Platform and
Qualcomm® AI Engine. The camera can also power advanced
Azure services, such as machine learning, stream analytics and
cognitive services, that can be downloaded from the cloud to run
locally on the edge.
Data and AI development for a new era
Using data, machine learning and cognitive intelligence,
developers can build and manage AI-rich solutions that transform
the ways people work, collaborate and live:
- Microsoft announced Project Kinect for Azure, a package
of sensors, including our next-generation depth camera, with
onboard compute designed for AI on the Edge. Building on Kinect's
legacy that has lived on through HoloLens, Project Kinect for Azure
empowers new scenarios for developers working with ambient
intelligence. Combining Microsoft's industry-defining Time of
Flight sensor with additional sensors all in a small,
power-efficient form factor, Project Kinect for Azure will leverage
the richness of Azure AI to dramatically improve insights and
operations. It can input fully articulated hand tracking and
high-fidelity spatial mapping, enabling a new level of precision
solutions.
- A Speech Devices SDK announced today delivers superior
audio processing from multichannel sources for more accurate speech
recognition, including noise cancellation, far-field voice and
more. With this, developers can build a variety of voice-enabled
scenarios like drive-thru ordering systems, in-car or in-home
assistants, smart speakers, and other digital assistants.
- Azure Cosmos DB updates include new and differentiated
multimaster at global scale capabilities, designed to support both
the cloud and the edge, along with the VNET general availability
for increased security. With these new updates, Cosmos DB delivers
even greater cost-effectiveness and global scale, further cementing
it as the fastest-growing database service in the world.
- A preview of Project Brainwave, an architecture for deep
neural net processing, is now available on Azure and on the edge.
Project Brainwave makes Azure the fastest cloud to run
real-time AI and is now fully integrated with Azure Machine
Learning. It also supports Intel FPGA hardware and ResNet50-based
neural networks.
- New Azure Cognitive Services updates include a unified
Speech service with improved speech recognition and
text-to-speech, which support customized voice models and
translation. Along with Custom Vision, these updates make it easier
for any developer to add intelligence to their applications.
- Microsoft is making Azure the best place to develop
conversational AI experiences integrated with any agent. New
updates to Bot Framework and Cognitive Services will power the
next generation of conversational bots enabling richer dialogs, and
full personality and voice customization to match the company's
brand identity.
- A preview of Azure Search with Cognitive Services
integration. This new feature combines AI with indexing
technologies so it's possible to quickly find information and
insights, whether via text or images.
Multisense and multidevice experiences
Microsoft also demonstrated mixed-reality capabilities to enable
richer experiences that understand the context surrounding people,
the things they use, their activities and relationships:
- A new initiative, Project Kinect for Azure — a package
of sensors from Microsoft that contains our unmatched time of
flight depth camera, with onboard compute, in a small,
power-efficient form factor — designed for AI on the Edge.
Project Kinect for Azure brings together this leading hardware
technology with Azure AI to empower developers with new scenarios
for working with ambient intelligence.
- With Microsoft Remote Assist, customers can collaborate
remotely with heads-up, hands-free video calling, image sharing,
and mixed-reality annotations. Firstline Workers can share what
they see with any expert on Microsoft Teams, while staying hands on
to solve problems and complete tasks together, faster.
- With Microsoft Layout, customers can design spaces in
context with mixed reality. Import 3-D models to create room
layouts in real-world scale, experience designs as high-quality
holograms in physical space or in virtual reality, and share and
edit with stakeholders in real time.
Modern tooling and experiences for any platform in any
language
Microsoft is empowering developers to build for the new era of
the intelligent edge, across Azure, Microsoft 365 and other
platforms, using the languages and frameworks of their choice:
- With Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), developers can
drastically simplify how they build and run container-based
solutions without deep Kubernetes experience. Generally available
in the coming weeks, AKS integrates with developer tools and
workspaces, DevOps capabilities, networking, monitoring tools, and
more in the Azure portal, so developers can write code, not stitch
services together. In addition, Microsoft is now offering
Kubernetes support for Azure IoT Edge devices.
- Visual Studio IntelliCode is a new capability that
enhances everyday software development with the power of AI.
IntelliCode provides intelligent suggestions to improve code
quality and productivity and is available in preview today in
Visual Studio.
- Visual Studio Live Share, now in preview, lets
developers easily and securely collaborate in real time with team
members who can edit and debug directly from their existing tools
like Visual Studio 2017 and VS Code. Developers can use Live Share
with any language for any scenario, including serverless,
cloud-native and IoT development.
- Building on our shared commitment to developers and open
source, Microsoft announced a new partnership with GitHub that
brings the power of Azure DevOps services to GitHub customers.
Today, we released the integration of Visual Studio App Center and
GitHub, which provides GitHub developers building apps for iOS and
Android devices to seamlessly automate DevOps processes right from
within the GitHub experience.
- Available today, the new Microsoft Azure Blockchain
Workbench makes it easier to develop blockchain applications by
stitching together an Azure-supported blockchain network with cloud
services like Azure Active Directory, Key Vault and SQL Database,
reducing proof-of-concept development time dramatically.
Microsoft (Nasdaq "MSFT" @microsoft) enables digital
transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an
intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every
organization on the planet to achieve more.
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SOURCE Microsoft Corp.