Microsoft announces AI updates in products, partnership with Reddit

San Francisco, Dec 14 : Highlighting its progress in the area of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Microsoft has announced a slew of updates to its AI assistant Cortana, search engine Bing and Office 365.

The company also announced a new partnership between Reddit and Bing.

Additionally, the company announced new features added to the "Seeing AI" app on iOS and demonstrated AI's integration with products, like HoloLens and customers, including Cheetah Mobile, UPS and Equadex.

Microsoft said Bing's newest features, Intelligent Answers, Advanced Image Search and Conversational Search now leverage AI to provide the most relevant results and search capabilities.

The Perspective Engine is introduced to help search users make sense of the jumble of numbers they increasingly encounter in the digital world.

New hands-free, eyes-free capabilities were added to Cortana to help with email and calendar management as well as the new Skills Suggestion and Chaining capabilities, giving Cortana the ability to understand users' overall intent and offer the next most relevant skill.

New AI capabilities in Office 365 for Outlook, Word and Excel now deliver personalized experiences that harness the power of intelligence to help people work smarter and focus on what matters most.

"A new partnership with Reddit, to bring information from the Reddit community to Bing. This is the first search partnership of its kind and includes three experiences; Reddit Responses, Reddit Community Results and Reddit AMA Discovery, with more to come," the company said.

"Seeing AI" app received new features, including currency and colour recognition, audible light detector and expansion to more than 35 countries.

The app is free on iOS and designed for people who are blind or have a visual impairment, helping users see more of the world.

Updates were made to Cognitive Services, including the general availability of The Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS) and Azure Bot Service among other updates, continuing the commitment of making AI available to everyone.

Intelligent features in the all new Photos app for Windows 10 make it easier to manage, search and create videos to bring your memories to life.

Microsoft also highlighted a new commitment of $50 million over the next five years to grow AI for Earth programme.