If Bloomberg Businessweek's latest cover story didn't make obvious enough, the hour or so the company dedicated to them on stage at its BUILD developer conference should have cleared up any doubts: Microsoft sees Cortana as a big part of its future. It wants the AI assistant to do everything, but knows it can't make that dream a reality by itself. Its new framework allows developers to build an independent chatbot that plays nice with users and Cortana. It's not the only one pursuing the goal of the perfect assistant, though, and there's no telling if its efforts to inspire an army of chatbots will be successful. Although chatbots have been around for half a century, they didn't have a practical use until the internet took hold.

Microsoft also announced a series of APIs (22 of them) as part of its Cognitive Services. These APIs are built around more general intelligence services (vision, speech, search, contextual knowledge and so on) that developers can build into their applications. Microsoft demonstrated some incredible early applications of this, such as the ability to take a picture and have it recognize the objects in it, but also to build information about the image using what it called CaptionBot. In one demonstration, Microsoft showed off what it called CRIS, or custom recognition intelligence service, and compared a speech-to-text translation of a child speaking. Naturally, its analysis showed a much higher precision of interpretation based on its knowledge of child speech patterns.

Microsoft spoke at length at Build 2016 about its vision for the future of communicative computing. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella expressed his belief that the next leap in consumer interactions with platforms will move beyond the traditional confinements of everyday operating system navigation to a more predictive artificial intelligence presence in people's lives. However, before Nadella's utopian science fiction fantasy becomes an everyday reality for the average consumer, Microsoft along with the rest of the industry will need to refine the API's, natural language frameworks, and machine learning of the bots that will be communicating with people. Shortly after Build 2016, Microsoft Cognitive Services page surfaced on the internet to help developers enable natural and contextual interactions between their services and the customers they link to. Microsoft Cognitive Services let you build apps with robust algorithms using just a few lines of code.

The Amazon Echo has quietly become the hottest smart home product on the market. Suddenly, every tech company wants to integrate its products with Amazon's customizable virtual assistant, Alexa. The integrations keep coming, at such a pace that it can be hard to know exactly which products work with Alexa. Amazon's website tries to keep on top of things, but its interface can be tough to navigate. It also (understandably) underplays the fact that you don't need an Echo to take advantage of Alexa and all the devices she can control.

Machine Learning algorithms powered by intelligent applications serve useful functions in our daily lives in ways we may not even be aware of. For instance, predictive analytics allow businesses to retain key customers, help assembly lines and buildings to run more efficiently, and help us find movies that we are likely to find intriguing. The ML field has gained tremendous traction and respect over the last decade, prompting Harvard Business Review to name the Data Scientist the sexiest job of the 21st century. To encourage new ML applications and foster a vibrant online community, we thrilled to launch Cortana Intelligence Competitions, a gamification feature of Cortana Intelligence Suite, as well as our first competition Decoding Brain Signals. This platform provides an intuitive and fun environment to hone users' data science and analytics expertise, and our first competition will allow you to have the chance to contribute to the important field of neuroscience to win prizes and recognition.

Following in the steps of competitors like Slack, Microsoft announced onstage at Build 2016 in San Francisco that it will be generously supporting bots on the Skype platform with a brand new SDK. Onstage at Build, the company showed off two different bots: video bots, which operate within a live video feed, and text bots working in conjunction with Cortana. Don't miss our biggest TNW Conference yet! For those familiar with the helpful text AI assistants, a lot of it is the same: bots can help coordinate travel, deliveries and other handy things right within Skype. With Cortana as ringleader, the actions seem very similar to that of Slackbot or Facebook Messenger's capabilities.

We cover many emerging markets in the startup ecosystem. Previously, we published posts that summarized Financial Technology, Internet of Things, Bitcoin, and MarTech in six visuals. This week, we do the same with Artificial Intelligence (AI). At this time, we are tracking 855 AI companies across 13 categories, with a combined funding amount of 8.75 billion. To see the full list of 855 Artificial Intelligence startups, contact us using the form on www.venturescanner.com.

Cortana, the personal digital assistant baked into Windows 10, is about to get more powerful and even easier to converse with. Microsoft's building more utility and contextual awareness into Cortana, including more proactive actions where she offers to perform tasks without even being prompted, and putting it all at your beck and call with powerful natural language tools. A quick pair of demos by Marcus Ash, the group product manager for Cortana at Microsoft, drove home how useful the new skills can be. In one, he asked Cortana to "send [a colleague] the PowerPoint that I worked on last night." This seemingly simple command is actually deceptively complex; to fulfill it, Cortana has to know what PowerPoint document Ash was talking about, when he was using it, and who the colleague is.

Microsoft wants people to have more intelligent conversations with their computers. The giant software company is promoting new tools for software developers to build intelligent "bots" or commercial programs that will work with Cortana, its voice-activated digital assistant, to perform tasks like booking a hotel room, ordering a meal or arranging a delivery. Microsoft recently shut down an experimental messaging bot after some Twitter users taught it to make offensive statements. CEO Satya Nadella said the episode showed the importance of designing technology to be "inclusive and respectful." Nadella touted the power of "conversational" computing at the company's annual Build conference for software developers in San Francisco, where Microsoft also announced some updates to its flagship Windows 10 software.

Microsoft has unveiled a new system of bots that can represent businesses and interact with users via Skype. Social bots are automated programs that can chat to users in a humanlike way. As part of the Build developer conference, Microsoft also revealed updates to digital assistant Cortana, which can interact with bots on the user's behalf. Cortana will now function across various devices and operating systems, like Android and iOS. The tech giant also announced a Skype app for its HoloLens headset.