Artificial intelligence takes centre stage at Build 2018 V3

Microsoft has surprised no-one by taking part in the AI frenzy currently sweeping the tech industry at its Build conference this week. Multiple projects were shown off; here are some of the most important. First out of the blocks is Redmond's work and a limited beta of squashing Cortana and Alexa together to allow the two virtual assistants to chat together. Talking of talking to AI, Microsoft highlighted an overhaul of its conversational AI bots, which should make it easier for developers to get such smart collections of code up and running on the firm's Azure cloud platform or their own servers, with more options for customisation and integration. For example, a new project dubbed Project Conversation Learner will let developers feed conversations into the bot framework, while Redmond's machine learning tech figures out new dialogue sequenced on top of them. On the topic of projects, Microsoft also showed off Brainwave, a deep learning neural network architecture that's designed, in theory, to make Azure the fastest cloud platform for running AI systems on.