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Innovation

Microsoft starts testing five more Garage incubator apps

Microsoft's Garage incubator has added five new invitation-only apps to its roster of experimental projects.
Written by Mary Jo Foley, Senior Contributing Editor

Microsoft's Garage incubator has launched five new, experimental consumer apps.

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Credit: Microsoft

The five latest:

  • Hearing AI: An app for "experiencing sound and speech through graphical visualizations," which provides notifications about sound changes in users' environments
  • Project Copenhagen: An app for viewing, attaching and sharing OneDrive files with Gmail users
  • Project Oceana: An app for accessing users' Outlook inboxes from within their Chrome browsers
  • Project Santorini: An app for exploring and revisiting photos stored in OneDrive in a quicker and more organized way
  • Write Ideas: An app that acts as a writing-assignments previewing tool

Last week, Microsoft also took the wraps off another Garage incubator app called Cache, which allows users to bookmark text snippets, images, web pages, files and notes so they can be used cross-platform.

All six of these apps are open to those interested in testing "by invitation." Users can request invitations inside the app descriptions.

The Garage originally started out in 2009 as part of Office Labs. Starting in 2014, Microsoft began making over the Garage into an internal employee-hacking community, focused on getting cross-platform apps into the hands of consumers.

Garage apps are all consumer-focused, with some falling into the productivity category, and others more in the "leisure" one. Customer feedback is what will determine whether each app has a future.

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