Microsoft is making the tools behind applications like Cortana available on code repository GitHub, opening the doors to new open source machine learning projects based on its software programmes. Redmond originally created the toolkit, known as Computational Network Toolkit (CNTK), out of necessity to help its developers make faster improvements to how well computers can understand speech. But in a blog post, Microsoft explained that CNTK has proved to be "more efficient" than the four notable computational toolkits – namely Theano, TensorFlow, Torch7, and Caffe – that developers were using to create deep learning applications. "The CNTK toolkit is just insanely more efficient than anything we have ever seen," said Xuedong Huang, chief speech scientist at Microsoft. This has allowed Microsoft's researchers to create systems that can accurately recognise and translate conversations, as well as ones that can recognise images and even answer questions about them.

We curated some use cases of companies that have integrated cognitive into their solutions. If you want to know more about any these use cases and receive tips from these companies, check out their webinars. VineSleuth's Wine4.Me In-Store Wine Advisor takes the guesswork out of buying wine by empowering shoppers and increasing sales. Shoppers tell the application what they want in a wine (flavor profile, food pairing, price requirements and more) and Watson returns a custom curated, unbiased wine list and suggests food pairings for each shopper. How it works: VineSleuth uses Natural Language Classifier and Speech to text APIs to allow consumers to easily ask a question into the application, either through voice or text.

Business agility is becoming a strategic necessary. Companies cannot be competitive if they not staying ahead of their customers' expectations. You can see the effect of this when Apple introduced Siri in 2011 with the release of iPhone 4S, changing the customer experience. Since then, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have all come up with their own A.I. concierge services to assure that they are meeting the customer expectations. Look at the current robotic interactive voice response (IVR) systems that require you to navigate through layers of menus to retrieve a simply answer: "Has my claim been paid?"

Microsoft has introduced a remarkable new Skype update aiming to hoist itself to greater heights by altering the face of the chat app into something far more sophisticated. The software giant has recently unveiled a game-changing Skype update that will transform it into a commanding platform for interacting with other apps. According to reports, the new update will enable Microsoft's virtual assistant Cortana and other third-party apps to seamlessly integrate with Skype. With a huge surge in mobile apps in recent times, downloading, setting up, and managing a large number of newly introduced apps can be an exasperating prospect for many phone users, owing to many accessibility constraints. As a consequence, users end up confining themselves to a mere handful of user apps.

Microsoft's recently launched, A.I.-powered bot Tay may have embarrassed the company when Twitter users taught the machine how to be racist, but Microsoft hasn't given up on the future of bot development. At Microsoft's annual Build conference in San Francisco today, CEO Satya Nadella unveiled the company's plans to bring the world of bots to "conversational platforms" – meaning not only Skype, but also other communications tools like Slack, Outlook, LINE, and more. News of the bots' unveiling was previously reported by Bloomberg, but today's onstage demonstrations revealed how bots, including Microsoft's own virtual assistant Cortana, aim to help pave the way for the future of communication, productivity, and interactions with businesses and brands. In Skype, the company showed off rich Cortana integration which put the assistant directly into the app where she could help users do things like identify the persons, places and things in your messages, underline them, and then display more info in a card-like interface when clicked. She is also able to help you perform a variety of tasks, like adding items to your calendar, booking travel or hotel rooms, or even pre-populating conversations to friends with text.

Conversation fillers such as "hmm" and "uh-huh" may seem like insignificant parts of human conversation, but they're critical to improving communication between humans and artificial intelligence. So argues Alan Black, a professor in the Language Technologies Institute at the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science, who specializes in speech synthesis and ways to make artificially intelligent speech sound more real. Both Siri and Cortana incorporate aspects of Black's work, he says. But for the most part, such technologies still boil down to a pretty simple pattern: The human speaks, then the machine processes that speech and answers. "It's not really how humans interact," Black said in an interview on Friday. Key to making such conversations more natural are pauses, fillers, laughs and the ability of speakers to anticipate and complete each other's sentences -- all of which help build rapport and trust.

PLM software is hard to interact with. I think the hardest part is PLM workflows. Usually very sophisticated it creates a complex jungle of choice, buttons and diagrams. But if you think about it, the goal is pretty simple – to communicate with people about information and decision making process. Existing workflows applications are hard.

Artificial intelligence is in the news on a daily basis--some estimates suggest millions of knowledge workers will be replaced by AI in the coming decade. Should we celebrate or worry? Artificial intelligence, dreamed about (or feared) for decades, will undoubtedly be one of the defining technologies of our generation. Elements of AI are already working their way into our daily life--self-driving cars, financial robo-advisors, and "personal assistants" that suggest what we should be doing this afternoon. Vast sums have already been invested in AI: more than 1 billion in VC investment since 2010; 1 billion in AI R&D by Toyota alone; and the Open AI initiative, which has pledged 1 billion. It seems the promise of AI is being realized as we speak--while at the same time, some of our leading technologists and policy makers are ringing alarm bells about the uncontrolled development of these new capabilities.

Conversation fillers such as "hmm" and "uh-huh" may seem like insignificant parts of human conversation, but they're critical to improving communication between humans and artificial intelligence. So argues Alan Black, a professor in the Language Technologies Institute at the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science, who specializes in speech synthesis and ways to make artificially intelligent speech sound more real. Both Siri and Cortana incorporate aspects of Black's work, he says. But for the most part, such technologies still boil down to a pretty simple pattern: The human speaks, then the machine processes that speech and answers. "It's not really how humans interact," Black said in an interview on Friday. Key to making such conversations more natural are pauses, fillers, laughs and the ability of speakers to anticipate and complete each other's sentences -- all of which help build rapport and trust.

THAT a computer program can repeatedly beat the world champion at Go, a complex board game, is a coup for the fast-moving field of artificial intelligence (AI). Another high-stakes game, however, is taking place behind the scenes, as firms compete to hire the smartest AI experts. Technology giants, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Baidu, are racing to expand their AI activities. Last year they spent some 8.5 billion on deals, says Quid, a data firm. That was four times more than in 2010.