From search to translation, AI research is improving Microsoft products

Until recently, a multinational company looking to help customers around the world book international travel would have had to build separate chatbots from scratch to converse in French, Hindi, Japanese or other languages. But thanks to artificial intelligence research breakthroughs that have enabled algorithms to more accurately parse nuances in the way different languages express concepts or structure sentences, it is now possible to build a single bot and use Microsoft Translator to translate questions and answers accurately enough for use in multiple countries. Over the past few years, Microsoft deep learning researchers were the first to achieve human parity milestones in developing algorithms that could perform about as well as a person on research benchmarks testing conversational speech recognition, reading comprehension, translation of news articles and other challenging language understanding tasks. Now, the benefits of those AI research breakthroughs are making their way into products from Azure to Bing. Search engineers are borrowing lessons from Microsoft AI researchers who developed a new deep neural network model that can learn from multiple natural language understanding tasks at once.