Microsoft answers Google's big data analytics bet, antes with conversational intelligence at Build 2016

Microsoft unveiled a slew of new products at its Build 2016 conference in San Francisco on Wednesday. They offered cues about the emerging technologies healthcare CIOs and IT professionals should be keeping an eye on right now: artificial intelligence, cognitive computing and what CEO Satya Nadella called conversational intelligence. "Conversations as-a-platform is a simple concept yet very powerful in impact," Nadella said. The unveiling of Microsoft's new conversational intelligence tool comes close on the heels of Google's GCP Next confab this past week, where the search giant revealed its Cloud Machine Learning family of hosted applications. The software giant rechristened its Cortana Analytics Suite as the Cortana Intelligence Suite to deliver "the power of Big Data, Cloud and Intelligence to build the next generation of intelligent solutions, whether it is to reinvent healthcare, transform transportation or revolutionize retail," Microsoft's data group's corporate vice president Joseph Sirosh wrote on the company's site.