Microsoft said on Thursday that it was reorganizing part of the company to better position itself as one of the significant players in the emerging field of artificial intelligence. The company has created a new organization that combines its research group, one of the largest in the technology industry, and a number of products that rely on artificial intelligence, including its Bing search engine and Cortana virtual assistant. The new artificial intelligence and research group at Microsoft will have more than 5,000 employees. Microsoft also said that one of its top executives, Qi Lu, has left the company to recuperate from a serious bicycling accident that occurred several months ago. Once he recovers, Mr. Lu will continue to act as an adviser to Satya Nadella, Microsoft's chief executive, and Bill Gates, its co-founder, Mr. Nadella said in an email to company employees Thursday.

Microsoft's Artificial Intelligence and Research Group, a major new engineering and research division formed last year inside the Redmond company, is debuting a new technology that lets developers customize Microsoft's speech-to-text engine for use in their own apps and online services. The new Custom Speech Service is set for release today as a public preview. Microsoft says it lets developers upload a unique vocabulary -- such as alien names in Human Interact's VR game Starship Commander -- to produce a sophisticated language model for recognizing voice commands and other speech from users. It's the latest in a series of "cognitive services" from Microsoft's Artificial Intelligence and Research Group, a 5,000-person division led by Microsoft Research chief Harry Shum. The company says it has expanded from four to 25 cognitive services in the last two years, including 19 in preview and six that are generally available.

Microsoft's new Artificial Intelligence and Research Group announced that its Microsoft Cognitive Services includes now 25 tools forming the backbone for Cortana digital assistant and the Skype Translator. According to Hot Hardware, two of the new APIs created by the company's new Artificial Intelligence and Research Group are the Content Moderator and Bing Speech. Bing Speech is capable of both converting text to speech and translating speech into text. Microsoft's speech recognition technology uses language and acoustic models to in order to distinguish between similar-sounding words and to customize its services for a specific language. In order to narrow the focus of the recognition engine, a Custom Speech Service lets developers supply their own data.

In its first aquisition of calendar 2017, Microsoft announced plans to buy Montreal-based deep-learning startup Maluuba for an undisclosed amount. Maluuba has done work in natural-language understanding and reinforcement learning. Harry Shum, Microsoft executive vice president of the company's Artificial Intelligence and Research Group, explained a potential scenario where Maluuba's technology could help this way: While privacy and regulation will slow the pace of adoption, AI will bring some profound changes to healthcare. Yoshua Bengio, an advisor to Maluuba and head of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, also will be advising Microsoft and interacting directly with Shum as part of the deal. Microsoft created the combined Artificial Intelligence and Research Group last September concurrently with the departure of executive vice president Qi Lu, who previously led the combined Office and Bing organizations.

Redmond today announced the Azure Bot Service, a new service for its Azure cloud platform designed to help developers create intelligent bots for Azure using the Microsoft Bot Framework. The bots will run on Azure Functions, a serverless environment, that allows enterprises to scale their bots as needed. The Azure Bot Service will let enterprises build, connect, deploy, and manage bots that interact naturally with users through an app, Web site, SMS platform, Slack, Facebook Messenger, Skype, and several other popular services. Microsoft said the new service will help companies accelerate intelligent bot development. "You can get started quickly with out-of-the-box templates such as the basic bot, Language Understanding Intelligent Service bot, form bot, and proactive bot," Lili Cheng, an engineer with Microsoft's Artificial Intelligence and Research Group, said on the company's blog.

Microsoft Corp. MSFT, 0.70% said Thursday it is expanding its artificial intelligence effort with the creation of a new unit called Microsoft AI and Research. The group will be led by Microsoft veteran Harry Shum and will be joined by more than 5,000 computer scientists and engineers, the company said in a statement. The move is expected to accelerate the company's effort to deliver new AI capabilities. Shares were flat in early trade, but are up 4.5% in the year to date, while the S&P 500 SPX, 0.43% has gained 6%.

Microsoft said on Thursday that it was reorganizing part of the company to better position itself as one of the significant players in the emerging field of artificial intelligence. The company has created a new organization that combines its research group, one of the largest in the technology industry, and a number of products that rely on artificial intelligence, including its Bing search engine and Cortana virtual assistant. The new artificial intelligence and research group at Microsoft will have more than 5,000 employees. Microsoft also said that one of its top executives, Qi Lu, has left the company to recuperate from a serious bicycling accident that occurred several months ago. Once he recovers, Mr. Lu will continue to act as an adviser to Satya Nadella, Microsoft's chief executive, and Bill Gates, its co-founder, Mr. Nadella said in an email to company employees Thursday. The creation of a new group at Microsoft with a focus on artificial intelligence was already planned, but the departure of Mr. Lu -- a respected computer scientist who spent a decade at Yahoo -- affected the shape of the new organization.