We live in a world of talking digital helpers, from Siri, to the Google Assistant, to Amazon Alexa, and Microsoft's version, Cortana. While Amazon and Microsoft announced back in August of last year that the two companies would be collaborating to make their two virtual assistants work together, today we saw a version of that in action. If you're imagining Alexa and Cortana freely talking to each other like two robotic hosts in Westworld, you are out of luck. However, what they showed was still interesting. Meghan Saunders, general manager for Cortana at Microsoft, and Tom Taylor, a senior vice president for Alexa at Amazon, joined each other on stage for a demonstration.

At the Microsoft Build conference on Monday, the company kicked off a new cloud offering that would provide machine learning resources to cloud customers using Intel FPGA-accelerated servers. "I think this is a first step in making the FPGAs more of a general-purpose platform for customers," said Mark Russinovich, chief technical officer for Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform. The technology is being offered as "preview," which apparently means only a limited set of capabilities and allocations are available. Also, at this point, only customers with accounts in the East US 2 region will be able to access the platform. This represents the commercialization of Microsoft's Project Brainwave, an FPGA-based machine learning platform the company developed over the past year.

At the Microsoft Build conference on Monday, the company kicked off a new cloud offering that would provide machine learning resources to cloud customers using Intel FPGA-accelerated servers. "I think this is a first step in making the FPGAs more of a general-purpose platform for customers," said Mark Russinovich, chief technical officer for Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform. The technology is being offered as "preview," which apparently means only a limited set of capabilities and allocations are available. Also, at this point, only customers with accounts in the East US 2 region will be able to access the platform. This represents the commercialization of Microsoft's Project Brainwave, an FPGA-based machine learning platform the company developed over the past year.

Microsoft wants to bring smart AI bots to every computer - despite its much publicised disastrous attempt to create a'teen' AI. CEO Satya Nadella used the firm's Build conference in San Francisco to call for users'to have more intelligent conversations with their computers.' The giant software company is promoting new tools for software developers to build intelligent'bots' or commercial programs that will work with Cortana, its voice-activated digital assistant, to perform tasks like booking a hotel room, ordering a meal or arranging a delivery. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella delivers the keynote address at the Microsoft Build Conference, Wednesday, March 30, 2016, in San Francisco. CEO Satya Nadella used the firm's Build conference in San Francisco to call for users'to have more intelligent conversations with their computers.'