Microsoft banks on bots to restore company's mobile relevance - Artificial Intelligence Online

Unfortunately, Microsoft Corp.'s most high-profile attempt at showcasing the future – the conversational chatbot called Tay – turned into a racist, anti-social monster that appears unfixable. But even if Tay worked perfectly, it didn't actually have any jobs to do, and the kind of bots Microsoft wants its software partners to develop and host on platforms like Skype are intended to reshape technology from something based on pointing and clicking to an actual conversation with our machines. Microsoft chief executive officer Satya Nadella outlined his vision of the future to a crowd of software developers in a keynote speech on Wednesday at the company's Build conference in San Francisco. The event was chockablock with updates to Microsoft services: The first major update to Windows 10 was confirmed for the summer, Xbox will be better integrated with Windows, the same goes for Linux, and the HoloLens augmented reality visor will begin to ship to developers immediately. But the main thrust of the event was for Mr. Nadella to describe how bots and machine learning tools are going to create a new "distributed computing fabric" that will vault Microsoft back into relevance on mobile platforms that are built and owned by rivals at Apple and Google.