Microsoft is continuing to focus its Cortana digital assistant on productivity scenarios by phasing out Cortana Skills starting in September and dropping Cortana mobile app support and more in 2021.
Microsoft's Xiaoice social chatbot is going to become part of a separate company which will prioritize commercializing the AI technology..
Microsoft is looking to combine the video and image content analysis technology it is acquiring with Orions Systems to supplement its own Dynamics 365 Connected Store app and Power Platform services.
Microsoft is adding a new healthcare-focused text analytics interface to its family of AI programming interfaces, and it's making generally available Custom Commands and Form Recognizer APIs, as well.
Microsoft President Brad Smith is continuing to champion regulation of facial-recognition tech, saying Microsoft has not sold such technology, to date, to U.S. law enforcement.
Microsoft's Virtual Assistant Accelerator and Bot Framework Composer tools are now generally available. And developers can now use Bot Framework to create new Alexa skills.
Microsoft is rolling out its new standalone Cortana productivity-aide app and updating its Cortana app with new features on iOS, simultaneous with the Windows 10 2004 rollout.
Microsoft is building a supercomputer for and with OpenAI and is using it to train massive distributed AI models, which it is counting on to improve the AI capabilities in its own software and services.
Microsoft's AI chatbot for healthcare technology, which runs on Azure, is key to the CDC's COVID-19 patient-assessment bot.
Going forward, Cortana is all about productivity for Windows 10 users. But some consumer skills, like controlling music, will still be possible via Cortana apps for iOS and Android.