Thinking About Microsoft and Its AI Future (Premium)

Microsoft this week announced new ways in which it is sprinkling artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities across its many products and services.

And, yes, AI---like the nearly-interchangeable "machine learning"---is one of those recent trendy buzzwords that tech companies like to toss around with abandon. But it's hard to argue with the usefulness of these advances. Or with the fact that Microsoft is one of the few technology companies that can make major strides in doing so.

What's interesting about the announcements this week is that the improvements are spread across multiple Microsoft products and services, including Bing, Cortana, and Office 365.

As you may know, Microsoft is bringing Bing to the enterprise this year by integrating its long-lived enterprise search functionality into the web-based Bing user experience. The point is to provide a single and obvious search experience for all users, obviously, and to make it contextually and intelligently relevant.

Some of the advances we see in Bing will be familiar to anyone using Google services on mobile devices. For example, Bing is picking up a new feature that uses computer vision and object recognition to visually search the contents of a picture or other image for information.

But Bing is also stretching out in new directions, too. Another new feature will provide multiple viewpoints when the user asks a question for which there is no objective answer. Microsoft's example of such a query---"is cholesterol bad?"---is timely, since I just wrote about nutrition and diet and mentioned, somewhat in passing, that LDL cholesterol is not a marker of heart disease or of anything else. What I didn't write is that cholesterol has been wrongly demonized as the "cause" of heart disease and other issues. The real problem is inflammation. And cholesterol, as it turns out, isn't just "good," it's necessary for life.

Point being, Bing will now provide links to analysis and even opinions for subjective queries. I'm not sold on that latter bit, to be honest: We live in a fact-averse world, and for topics like health and diet, providing anything but the truth is dangerous. And, in this case, the convention wisdom---cholesterol is "bad"---is not the truth. Maybe that's the service that Bing could provide via AI: Filtering out fake news and faux facts.

Speaking of opinions, Microsoft will be adding information from Reddit AMA ("Ask Me Anything") posts with famous luminaries to Bing search results. This seems spurious at first, but as Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian notes, the site is a unique source of information and data that is not available anywhere else in the world. (It's also the source of the most inane and pedantic commenters in the world, but whatever.)

Moving forward to Cortana, Microsoft's digital personal assistant---which is powered largely by Bing, by the way---is being optimized for scenarios in which the user does not have a display or keyboard in front of the...

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