At the Build 2018 annual developer conference, Microsoft showcased several new technologies to help every developer adopt AI for Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365 and across any platform. Microsoft wants to build AI as it believes it 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.
Advancements in the intelligent edge and intelligent cloud:
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.
Microsoft also announced a joint effort with Qualcomm 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.
Data and AI development for a new era:
Microsoft announced Project Kinect for Azure, a package of sensors, including next-generation depth camera, with onboard computer designed for AI on the Edge. It can input fully articulated hand tracking and high-fidelity spatial mapping, enabling a new level of precision solutions.
The Speech Devices SDK 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.
A preview of Project Brainwave, an architecture for deep neural net processing, is now available on Azure and on the edge. 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 customised voice models and translation.
Multisense and multi-device experiences:
With Microsoft Remote Assist, customers can collaborate remotely with heads-up, hands-free video calling, image sharing, and mixed-reality annotations. With Microsoft Layout, users 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.
Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter.
