Microsoft CEO Nadella: 'Bots are the new apps'

Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, speaks at the keynote ceremony of the Microsoft Build Developers conference. SAN FRANCISCO – Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella kicked off the company's Build developers conference with a vision of the future filled with chatbots, machine learning and artificial intelligence. "Bots are the new apps," said Nadella during a nearly three hour keynote here that sketched a vision for the way humans will interact with machines. That's the world you're going to get to see in the years to come." Onstage demos hammered home those ideas. One involved a smartphone conversation with Cortana about planning a trip to Ireland, which soon found Cortana bringing in a Westin chatbot that booked a room based on the contents of the chat. Another featured a blind Microsoft engineer who helped design technology that allows him to take photos with a pair of smartglasses and have either a menu's contents or people's emotions described to him. Nadella placed such human-AI interactions under an umbrella he called Conversations as a Platform. "It's about taking power of human language and applying it more pervasively to all of our computing," he said. "We will infuse intelligence about us and our context into computers." The integrative AI-focused approach to the way humans interact with their digital lives comes not a moment too soon given the pressure Microsoft faces in this "Conversation as a Service sector from Amazon with Alexa and Google with Google Now," says Holger Mueller, analyst with Constellation Research. "All these new conversation canvasses need cloud as the delivery platform and Microsoft needs utilization to achieve economies of scale in the Azure build out." Microsoft had a less than successful rollout of a entertainment-focused chatbot just last week. Nadella drew a collective laugh from the 5,000 attendees when he mentioned Tay, which was taken offline after just one day of existence after hackers made it spew offensive comments. "We are back to the drawing board," he said. "Technology has to have the best of humanity, not the worst." That led to comments from the CEO about the need for a "principled approach" to this emerging technology, an oblique reference to the big drama that recently unfolded between Apple and the FBI." "We need to make choices about how we build technology," Nadella said.