Why Cortana’s new boss is obsessed with artificial intelligence - stovallhadvieterell

Late, Microsoft took the unusual step of placing its Cortana and Bing product teams inside the same organization as Microsoft Research. The novel Microsoft AI and Research Group leave embody led by computer visual sense groundbreaker and executive frailty chairwoman Harry Shum, whose 20-class Microsoft calling involves leading Bing's search efforts from 2007 through 2013 and helping launch Microsoft Research Communist China.

We asked Shum how this parvenue organization will benefit Microsoft's digital assistant in the following audience, which has been edited for duration and clarity. (If you want many, see our related stories on what Cortana 2.0 could look like, as advantageously A a deeper dive on how speech could work within Windows.)

The language of the blog post announcing the formation of Microsoft's new AI segmentation, together with how Satya Nadella has characterized it, suggests that Microsoft thinks it's in a space race of sorts when it comes to artificial intelligence. Is that hi-fi?

I just feel that the timing's right on to go galactic on AI. It's genial of a little bittersweet for me because I did my Ph.D. in robotics and Army Intelligence, my area was actually computer vision. When I calibrated a little while agone, I guess, it wasn't the best fourth dimension for AI graduates to find a virtuous farm out. And now you deal those people and anyone that knows how to train few layers of neural nets probably gets job offers from every company.

Microsoft

Microsoft onymous Harry Shum to lead the company's new AI and Research Group last week.

It is a very interesting clock time. Several technical factors have all converged, including the availability of a destiny of information, big computing power, and in the last several years I would say incredible progress in machine learning, especially deep learning. I think up people feel that it is the time, and we feel that way at Microsoft. That's why we made this big announcement to form the Microsoft AI and Research Group.

By seats Cortana and Bing's product teams next to Microsoft researchers, the implication is that these products will get along the point point for Microsoft's intelligence initiatives. How do you see both products improving as a result?

First of all LET me read that over the last 25 years everything we've established at Microsoft, MSR has contributed to products odd and right. I would claim that almost all major product inside the company benefited from some technology from MSR. The difference now is that to develop the case of AI products and services we in reality need to get those latest technologies into user's hands much faster, and so we see to it the demand to accelerate the cycle from inquiry to product. Which is why we ready-made this organization move to really get our researchers and developers in collaboration.

And these two products: If you look at Bing and you tone at Cortana. I personally worked on Bing for almost septenar geezerhood. The great unwashe certainly merit to get diametrical opinions, but I would tell that Bing is a credible search engine and that we offer people a credible choice. We have about a tertiary of the search traffic in the United States.,

Cortana is something that we really really get very excited about. And you're right, a merchandise look-alike Cortana symbolizes artificial intelligence. Today we really have about 133 million Cortana users, and we actually have answered to a higher degree 10 billion questions. People start to use Cortana increasingly. And with this connexion forces with MSR and with more MSR AI researchers I dead induce very high expectations in terms of the quality of Cortana, user experience of Cortana. All volition continue to improve.

I remember the figure of people actively using Cortana is less than half of the devices running Windows 10. Are you satisfied with that?

There's always elbow room for improvement, if you work these kind of products. And you are right, at that place are truly cardinal things that are most probatory when we design and ship this kind of product: the enumerate of users, and the come of user engagement. It's a selfsame absorbing excogitation decision: What is the product? What is this thing doing with, for the users? One of the things we certainly track is the phone number of conversations, with these agents, in every unwed session. We actually experience pretty good that Cortana compares well with other capitalistic products in the market.

I don't know if you know we have some other very exciting product called the XiaoIce chatbot. We shipped in China, and we shipped a Japanese version, besides equally popular in Japan, and we're still thinking about what to do for the U.S. market.

When you design a different kind of agent like a chatbot, the measure of user interaction is importantly higher and disparate. Soh it rattling depends on the product design.

Cortana right now is an assistant: She appears, and then disappears. Google is stressful a chatbot approach with Assistant. Do you think we'll see a Cortana chatbot in the near future?

Cortana is designed to facilitate people to complete a task, whether information technology represent a reminder that she should buy something for their mom's birthday OR that it is time to  leave for home base because the dealings is jammed. Or some of those knowledge kind of questions. This is the benevolent of design decision that we give birth to make today.

We wish memorize from the other chatbots we have already shipped and just about we're still developing. We sustain to attend what kind of user scenarios are more serious for the users. I don't think that there will be lonesome one intelligent agent in the world anytime soon. I suppose we will learn on the way.

Again, I want to emphasize the complexity and difficulty of this type of product. I think it's still early.

You're right away Cortana's honcho, so to speak. Can you compare Cortana's strengths and weaknesses with Siri and Google Assistant?

I would tell it's keen that we give birth those competing products in the market. I think nothing is more exciting than looking at the other great engineers, and what they'Re building.

I would say clearly we have the inheritance from Bing, we sympathize the Earth's noesis, and what we can do in that location. And and then we compare with opposite agents. We also understand about the users in distinguishable kinds of settings. Indeed there's old knowledge, as recovered American Samoa the other interesting connate information like the calendar information, that the users are willing to share with us, There's others, such as the email that they share with us. And so we can do a better caper.

Another thing that we have been very clear [on] from the get-go is that we do want Cortana to have some signifier of personality. So that's actually some other kind of design choice. If you look at Siri and Cortana, they probably have a very similar philosophy there. And opposite agents whitethorn think differently.

Microsoft is helpful me to experience a conversation in German – a language I do not speak – with soul else using Skype Transcriber. But speech identification is fundamental to early aspects of productivity, including bidding. Why isn't dictation performin a more prominent role within Word of God and Office?

I will tell you that at that place is really atomic number 102 reason why it is non playing a such more big role yet. Perch assured that we are infusing AI technology into all Microsoft products. I do want to tell you that if you uncomprehensible it, a couple of weeks past we actually announced that we broke the world record in error rates in speech recognition in the Switchboard test data. IBM has always been on top, and as of now we have reached first.

We are racing hard hopefully to become the first single to attain human mirror symmetry [recognition at the same level arsenic a human]. Hopefully anytime soon. (Editor program's Government note: On Tuesday, Microsoft same its voice communication-realization engineering has now achieved parity with human beings.)

Windows 10's speech technology dates back to Windows Vista, while Cortana's speech engineering was manifestly developed more recently. When will the Cortana voice communication technology be merged into Windows?

The technology that we use in Cortana is not based on the Vista engineering science. I guess Panorama is like a grandpa agent. That's likewise wherefore the Microsoft researchers are teaming up with those Army Intelligence mathematical product teams to really speed up the rhythm from the technology we have in the laboratory to the products that we set out into our users' hands. We're very excited about this and Bob Hope to indicate you to a greater extent progress soon.

Updated on Oct. 18 to note that Microsoft's oral communicatio recognition has now achieved parity with human beings.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/410534/meet-cortanas-new-boss-microsoft-ai-chief-harry-shum-on-how-shell-get-even-smarter.html

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