Spurred by recent advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence, context-aware intelligent assistants represent the new frontier of content search and discovery. Companies leverage unstructured datathings like photographs, videos, chat logs, documentsto make better, more informed business decisions to automate processes. Now leveraging humanlike capabilities inside automated workflows to augment whats possible in business and humanity.

When IBM opened up its Watson cognitive computing platform to developers last November, it launched an effort to enable anybody with programming skills and an idea to take the technology and use it as a foundation for building apps that can both understand natural language and learn new things to expand its knowledge base.

Watson represents a breakthrough in the field of artificial intelligence, and IBMs opening up the platform indicates just how far AI has come.

Microsoft is trying to make AI more human

Imagine if a machine could help you refine or augment the way you approach and think about new situations and solve challenges? Microsoft is looking at more advanced artificial intelligence for deployment on not only its own platforms, but also in the real world too.

Eric Horvitz, managing director of Microsofts research unit, recently said in an interview that Microsoft is working on an AI platform which, as part of the solution, involves allowing computers to look beyond questions posed. The software giant is working on improvements involving the AI capturing the context within speech to better understand questions. There are some critical signals in context. These include location, time of day, day of week, user patterns of behavior, current modalityare you driving, are you walking, are you sitting, are you in your office etc.

The deep learning techniques are finding their way into more and more Microsoft technologies, including Windows Phone, security, Xbox and other products. Microsoft is hoping that its upcoming digital assistant, currently known as Cortana will carry out all of the aforementioned tasks. For example, Cortana could be employed to help a user find a hotel, a specific type of restaurant (like Italian or Chinese), even a parking spot. To carry out these tasks, Cortana uses Microsofts unique Satori technology, which the firm currently uses with its Bing search engine.

In Xbox, the Kinect was also trained with machine learning. The fact that it can see you in the room even though its poor lighting and you can wave your arms and it can track youthats all done with a piece of software that was trained with machine learning. In addition, Microsoft is using machine learning in security. The company arms its malware analysts with machine learning-driven technology, both to give the analysts superpowers to make them much more effective at searching through lots of data, and also by autonomously helping to find malware authors.

Cognitive computing is the new frontier for developers

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AI Developers to power new generation of context driven artificial intelligence