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|In: AI|Last Updated: | 0 Comments

Microsoft India showcased several of its own and third-party solutions that use Microsoft Cognitive Services and bring the power of Artificial Intelligence [AI] to users and organizations through vision, speech, language, knowledge and search scenarios. Over 370 enterprise customers in India already use these cognitive APIs from Microsoft. Microsoft is working with over 650 partners to bring AI solutions to benefit large, medium and small enterprises in the country.

Microsoft Cognitive Services is a collection of intelligent APIs that allow systems to see, hear, speak, understand and interpret human needs using natural methods of communication. Developers can use these APIs to make their applications across platforms more intelligent, engaging and discoverable. Available at www.microsoft.com/cognitive, it includes APIs on

  • Vision: From faces to feelings, allow apps to understand images and video
  • Speech: Hear and speak to users by filtering noise, identifying speakers, and understanding intent
  • Language: Process text and learn how to recognize what users want
  • Knowledge: Tap into rich knowledge amassed from the web, academia, or your own data
  • Search: Locate relevant information among billions of web pages, images, videos, and news with the power of Bing APIs

To date, more than a million developers around the world have already discovered and tried Microsoft Cognitive Services.

Microsoft and partner solutions available to Indian customers are many. Here are a few examples.

Vision

Seeing AI – Designed for users with visual impairment, the Microsoft Seeing AI App combines Artificial Intelligence and rich computer vision to describe surrounding people, text, objects, colors, and currencies in real-time to the user, and is available for download on iOS devices. It can now detect Indian currency and narrate the denomination to the user. This includes all the currency notes that are currently in circulation including the new currency bills issued recently. The Seeing AI app now supports five different currencies including the Euro, US & Canadian dollars as well as British Pounds.

The Intelligent Kiosk – The Intelligent Kiosk is a Windows 10 Universal App showcasing workflows and experiences using Microsoft Cognitive Services. The kiosk app is a great example of an intelligent application, one that can analyze the emotions on human faces as well as still photographs and predict their age, gender and emotion. It also allows developers to quickly create and train a model to perform face identification against any pre-determined set of faces.

Transforming remote hiring – Bajaj Allianz General Insurance Company, India’s leading private general insurer, is using an automated video interviewing solution from Microsoft partner Talview to hire from the untapped talent from multiple cities across the country. The cloud-based solution, powered by Microsoft Azure, can be accessed by candidates from any smartphone device and is fully functional even on low speed Internet.

To be more competitive and agile in today’s dynamic marketplace, Bajaj Allianz needed to tap talent from multiple locations. This otherwise came with huge investments in time and resources from both the recruiter and candidate. Deploying automated video interviewing has saved the company time and resources while vastly improving the recruitment process. Candidates are now remotely participating in interviews via smartphones at their own convenient time and place, and  hiring managers have the flexibility to assess and evaluate  candidates without the need to travel to different locations. The company is also using Talview Behavioral Insights [TBI] to build behavioral profiles of candidates. These profiles are enabling hiring managers to find the right person for the job backed by data-driven insights.

Language

Real-time language translation – Microsoft has recently brought the power of AI and Deep Neural Networks [DNN] to improve real-time language translation for Hindi, Bengali, and Tamil. With DNN-powered language translation, the results are more accurate and sound more natural.  Users can avail the benefits of DNN-enhanced Indian language translation while surfing the internet across any website on the Microsoft Edge browser, on Bing search, Bing Translator website, as well as Microsoft Office 365 products like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Skype.

The Microsoft Translator app in Android and iOS can recognize and translate languages from text, speech and even photos. AI deployed in Microsoft’s language translation technologies is bringing more accurate speech recognition and higher quality machine-powered translations to all 60 languages supported by Microsoft’s translation technologies worldwide.

Knowledge [Conversational User Interfaces]

WittyParrot – WittyParrot is an AI & ML powered knowledge and process automation platform for sales, support and knowledge workers. Key solutions include Voice enabled Chat Bots, Document Automation, Contract Lifecycle, Omni-Channel Communication and Engagement. WittyParrot was part of Bengaluru-based Microsoft Accelerator’s 10th batch where they underwent an intensive six-month coaching and mentoring programme.

They are using Microsoft’s Azure cloud offering and leverage it for technologies like big data, Internet of Things [IoT] and advanced analytics, among others, while being fully integrated with Microsoft Office and Microsoft Office 365, several CRM platforms and various voice enabled chat-bot technologies. WittyParrot solutions are being used by leading IT and ITES organizations such as Oracle, Couchbase, Collabera and Data Endure.

Ruuh – Ruuh, Microsoft’s social AI chatbot created specifically for India, has approximately 1.5 million users. Launched a little over a year and a half ago, Ruuh has exchanged 100 million messages with her users so far. You can engage with her on Facebook in the same way you would interact with a friend.

She is built using the vast social content available on the Internet [with strong checks and balances to protect her from exploitation]. Further, she is well versed with Bollywood and has a good sense of humor too. As an AI chatbot, she is learning increasingly from human interactions to respond emotionally and intelligently, providing a unique viewpoint, with manners and emotional expressions.

Knowledge [Productivity]

AI in Office 365 – Microsoft’s AI infused Office 365 helps organizations and employees get the most out of O365 in the following ways:

  • Intelligent, personalized search: This personalized experience uses signals from the Microsoft Graph to provide tailored search results across content and people in an organization based on a user’s work patterns. The redesigned results are easier to explore and allow users to preview files with support for over 270+ different file types without ever leaving the search page.
  • PowerPoint Designer: It is easy to get beautiful designs in minutes for even more types of slides. Designer in PowerPoint now can recommend professional design options for bulleted process lists. This expansion builds upon previous Designer updates to incorporate facial detection, color extraction and more in images. Additional categories of text will be supported in the future, such as timelines.
  • QuickStarter in PowerPoint and Sway: Powered by the Bing Knowledge Graph, QuickStarter in Sway and PowerPoint provides carefully curated outlines for any topic, including recommendations on information to include, categories to consider and associated images tagged with Creative Commons licenses. This provides a solid starting point to then continue building a presentation.
  • MyAnalytics: Users can create better work habits with the help of Microsoft MyAnalytics. MyAnalytics provides insights to help understand how users spend time at work, across meetings, email, time they designate as ‘focus time’ and after-hours work. This way, they can set productivity goals and monitor progress over time.
  • Users can also gain visibility into who they collaborate with most. In the future, MyAnalytics will deliver insights to teams and Office 365 Groups to help them establish better ways of working together, uncover hidden inefficiencies and align on priorities.

Some useful resources for getting started with Microsoft’s Cognitive Services and How app developers can infuse Language & Speech capabilities into their apps can be found below:

Getting started with Microsoft Cognitive Services


Language with Microsoft Cognitive Services: Infusing language and speech capabilities into your app

AI and Microsoft

Microsoft has an ambitious goal to make AI accessible and valuable to every individual and organization, amplifying human ingenuity with intelligent technology.

Microsoft is infusing intelligence across all its products and services to extend individuals’ and organizations’ capabilities and make them more productive; providing a powerful platform of AI services and tools that makes innovation by developers and partners faster and more accessible; and helping transform business by enabling breakthroughs to current approaches and entirely new scenarios that leverage the power of intelligent technology.

In its work to deploy AI everywhere, Microsoft is taking a thoughtful and trusted approach – designing AI innovations that extend and empower human capabilities in all aspects of life, while keeping people in control. Microsoft’s approach to AI puts users in control, with intelligence that is transparent and secure, and sets the highest bar for protecting privacy, while also being inclusive and respectful to all.

|In: Marketing|Last Updated:

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Adobe & Microsoft Corporation announced a strategic partnership at Adobe Digital Summit, that will redefine how enterprises manage their marketing, sales and services to better engage with customers across all touch points.

The partnership will include the integration of Adobe’s industry leading Marketing Cloud Solutions with Microsoft’s best-in-class Dynamics CRM and allow brands to deliver experiences that take all customer engagements into account – from reach and acquisition to retention and loyalty. This new integration will help eliminate frustrating customer experiences that result when marketing, sales and service interactions are soiled.

Speaking at the occasion, Kirill Tatarinov, executive vice president, Microsoft Business Solutions said

Helping our customers reinvent productivity and business processes is one of our top priorities. Partnering with Adobe enables us to deliver a comprehensive set of customer engagement processes to enterprise customers to help them be more productive and better engage with their customers. The integration of our industry-leading Dynamics CRM solution with Adobe Marketing Cloud will enable business professionals to maximize their investment in technology and deliver breakthroughs in marketing, sales and customer care.

Microsoft Dynamics Marketing, Microsoft’s integrated marketing management solution, includes capabilities like marketing resource management that are complementary to Adobe Marketing Cloud to provide added value to customers.

The partnership will bring an integrated CRM-Marketing solution to marketers across many industry segments including financial services, travel and leisure.

This partnership offers customers the ability to do the following:

  • Align sales and marketing activities by tightly integrating audiences and their behaviors, which can help guide sales or service calls, identify sales opportunities or inform lead scoring.
  • Find high-value audience segments and provide them with real-time offers on the website or enable targeted display ads.
  • Combine Web behavior data with order history, return history, loyalty status and call center history to not only identify where in the sales life-cycle stage a customer is in, but then also deliver the right content at the right time, whether that content resides on a landing page, in a service follow-up email, or as an alert in a mobile app.

Adobe Campaign & Adobe Experience Manager are now certified on Microsoft Azure. The companies are also working on a connector that would enable data and insights from Adobe Analytics to appear in Power BI, Microsoft’s business analytics service that enables people to see all of their data through a single pane of glass, providing a consolidated view across a business.

About Adobe Marketing Cloud

Adobe Marketing Cloud empowers companies to use big data to effectively reach and engage customers and prospects with highly personalized marketing content across devices and digital touch points. Eight tightly integrated Solutions offer marketers a complete set of marketing technologies that focus on analytics, Web and app experience management, testing and targeting, advertising, social engagement and campaign orchestration. The tie-in with Adobe Creative Cloud makes it easy to instantly activate creative assets across all marketing channels.

|In: Technology|Last Updated:

edX, the non-profit online learning initiative joins hands with Microsoft Corporation as its first corporate member to offer MOOCs on edX.org. Through this program, Microsoft will offer the edX global learning community courses to acquire the core development skills needed to be successful in the cloud-first, mobile-first world.

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Taught by Microsoft experts, these first courses would focus on in-demand skills, feature interactive coding, assessments & exercises and are now open for enrolment. Anders Hejlsberg, technical fellow at Microsoft, will co-teach “Introduction to TypeScript” with “Introduction to Bootstrap”, students will learn a popular front-end web development framework. Students can enroll in Microsoft courses for free or obtain a verified certificate for a fee. Enrollment opens today, with courses beginning at the end of March.

Speaking about the collaboration, Anant Agarwal, CEO, edX said:

Microsoft has already made significant contributions to the edX platform by developing an XBlock that enables course creators to embed Office Mix lectures into their edX courses. With these new MOOCs, millions of edX learners around the world will gain important technical skills to excel in their careers.

Speaking at the occasion, Steve Guggenheimer, Corporate Vice President & Chief Evangelist, Developer Experience [DX] at Microsoft said:

Microsoft has a long history of working within the community to make coding and app development more accessible and rewarding to the growing number of people who want to help shape the technology industry. Together with edX, we can provide new opportunities for students and developers from around the world to create innovative applications, services & experiences that have a meaningful impact on today’s mobile and cloud centric world. This new initiative expands upon edX’s recent collaboration with Microsoft’s Office Mix. With Office Mix, educators produce videos and online lectures that deliver an engaging experience to students, with support for audio and video recordings, screen captures, hyper-links and digital ink.

Microsoft courses include

Programming with C#

C# is a widely-used .NET programming language that is designed to provide a simple yet powerful language for general purpose programming needs. Students will learn the fundamentals of C# supporting cross-platform application development.

Introduction to TypeScript

TypeScript is a new highly-productive superset of JavaScript that is rapidly gaining currency amongst developers who build and maintain large JavaScript applications. In this course co-authored by Anders Hejlsberg, students will learn language syntax and how to use TypeScript to generate JavaScript for any platform.

Introduction to Bootstrap

Bootstrap is a mobile-first web UI framework originally developed at Twitter that has become a foundational technology for front-end web development. This course will investigate the power of Bootstrap and how to implement it in applications.

Querying with Transact SQL

Transact-SQL is the structured query language for SQL Server. This course will show how to use Transact-SQL to code a range of solutions, ranging from retrieving data from a SQL Server database to implementing transactional programming logic.

Building Cloud Apps with Microsoft Azure

This course takes a patterns-based approach to building real-world cloud solutions on Microsoft Azure.  Students will learn the latest tools and technologies in cloud development and study the techniques for cloud-based application design.

Introduction to Office 365 API’s

Office 365 offers the tools users need to get work done anywhere and on any device. In this course, developers will learn how to create robust cross-platform applications using Office 365.

Windows PowerShell Fundamentals

This course provides fundamental knowledge and skills needed to use Windows PowerShell to automate common administrative functions in Windows-based clients and servers. Students will get hands-on practice to replace manual, repetitive & time-consuming operations with effective, automated solutions in both local and remote scenarios. This course is offered as part of the edX Professional Education series and has a fee associated with it.

About edX

EdX is a nonprofit, open-source enterprise offering online courses from more than 60 member institutions, composed of both leading global universities and colleges and a diverse group of prominent organizations from around the world. Founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, edX is focused on transforming online and on-campus learning through ground-breaking methodologies, game-like experiences and cutting-edge research on an open-source platform.

|In: Accelerator|Last Updated:

Deshpande Foundation’s Sandbox Startups Incubator today announced the opening of applications for the Incubation Program. Designed in association with Microsoft Ventures the program will help accelerate growth for Tier-II & Tier-III cities based startups in the social and for profit space. The program will commence on March 1, 2015.

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Applications will be accepted online through Sandbox Start-ups’ website. Deadline for submitting application is January 31, 2015.

Deshpande Foundation along with Microsoft Ventures will mentor the startups under this incubator and give them access to their well-established resources, opportunities & a pool of investors, experts, professionals & inspiring entrepreneurs.

Summing up the aims of the incubator program, Naveen Jha, CEO, Deshpande Foundation India said

Sandbox Startups is a living laboratory and test bed for promising new ideas. It essentially gives contextual understanding for startups, so they can create innovative products particularly relevant to India. We provide budding entrepreneurs with a launch pad to help them realize the potential for entrepreneurship, all the way from testing product ideas and building prototypes, to setting up a viable enterprise. Nanopix-ISS, Safehands24x7, Nextdrop, Aquasafi and Logistimo are some startups that have grown multi-fold with support from Sandbox Startups.

Speaking at the occasion, Rajinish Menon, Director, Microsoft Ventures, India mentioned

When it comes to startups, today entire India is buzzing with innovation, not just the Metros. Microsoft Ventures and Deshpande Foundation have designed this program to ensure these startups have a level playing field and same opportunities which is available to a startup in Bangalore or Delhi. In last few years, under the Partnered Accelerator Programs, Microsoft Ventures has joined hands with various incubators and accelerators in India to develop initiatives and boost the Indian startup community and extend Microsoft’s offering to a wider audience. This program has already enabled and empowered hundreds of startups in India. Through our Partner Accelerator Program and other initiatives, we are working towards accelerating the startup ecosystem in India and Deshpande Foundation is one of our key partners in realizing that vision.

30 startups will be selected for incubation at Sandbox Startups’ incubation centres in Hubli [Karnataka] & Nizamabad [Telangana]. The incubation program looks to support for-profit or social startups with innovative product/service with a potential to disrupt markets and create impact on masses. The program is open for startups from all sectors.

About Sandbox Startups

Founded in early 2009, Sandbox Startups is being nurtured by visionaries and successful entrepreneurs. Over the years, Sandbox Startups has become a hotbed for startups and it has supported over 100 ideas scale.

About Deshpande Foundation

The Deshpande Foundation, founded by global business leader and philanthropist Dr.Gururaj “Desh” Deshpande and Mrs. Jaishree Deshpande, has operations in India, Canada and the USA. The Foundation is building an ecosystem of resources to foster innovation and entrepreneurship. The Foundation’s efforts surround around the unique “Social Innovation Sandbox” in Hubli, Karnataka & Nizamabad, Telangana to create an ecosystem similar to Silicon Valley with focus on Social Entrepreneurship.

In the last eight years, the “Sandbox” has gained remarkable success having supported over 100 Non-profit & Social organisations, proved over a dozen proofs of concepts for social innovation and impacted over six million people. For more information, visit Deshpande Foundation website.

|In: Accelerator|Last Updated:

Deshpande Foundation and Microsoft Ventures,India announced a partnership to launch Sandbox Startups, an incubator focused on nurturing startups in tier-II & tier-III cities of India. The three-year collaboration was formalized with the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding [MOU] on August 23, in the presence of Dr Gururaj ‘Desh’ Deshpande [Founder, Deshpande Foundation], Mr Jairam Ramesh [Former Minister, Government of India], Mr Rajinish Menon [Director, Microsoft Ventures in India], Mr Naveen Jha [CEO, Deshpande Foundation] & other industry leaders.

As per their Press Release, the main reason for co-launching this initiative as per Naveen Jha [CEO, Deshpande Foundation] is below:

Unlike tier-I cities, most small cities lack adequate support system to nurture startups. Consequently, startups and startup potentials in these regions do not have access to requisite training, mentoring and a sandbag to try out their entrepreneurial stints. Sandbox Startups is aimed at providing a launch pad for aspiring entrepreneurs in tier-II & tier-III cities so that they can validate their business ideas, sharpen business acumen, develop products & launch solutions to the market.

 

Innovations by startups groomed under the program will add vibrancy to the ecosystem from those at the bottom of the pyramid.

 

The objective of this partnership is to work in an inclusive manner to ensure that all relevant stakeholders, such as early stage entrepreneurs, academia, students, venture capital community, mentors, advisors, HNI’s & corporates, are active participants in the innovation ecosystem.

Support for entrepreneurs in Tier-II & Tier-II cities

Rajinish Menon [Director, Microsoft Ventures in India] mentions that such an initiative was the need of the hour.

As the culture of innovation spreads, it’s fascinating to see the kind of problems that startups from smaller towns are trying to solve. Microsoft Venture’s partnership with Deshpande Foundation aims to engage with entrepreneurs from smaller towns at every stage of their journey from ideation to maturity.

 

At Microsoft, we are extremely excited to help incubators roll out products and raise capital to fund their growth, eventually benefiting India’s budding entrepreneurial ecosystem. And this specific endeavor is aimed at entrepreneurs from smaller towns which have a less mature ecosystem to nurture them.

 

Startups can call Microsoft’s Jumpstart hotline on 1800 200 2114 to know more about the program and how to be a part of this program.

About the Partnership

Deshpande Foundation in India actively nurtures innovation and entrepreneurship through various programs in its three sandbox regions – North Karnataka, Nizamabad in Telangana & Uttar Pradesh.

Partnering with Microsoft Ventures is a key step to support and nurture incubators, moving them to the next level by providing them an opportunity to get exposed to high end technology, get trained & mentored by professionals.

Both Microsoft Ventures and Deshpande Foundation will play a significant role to mentor the startups under this incubator.

Please visit Microsoft Ventures, India & Deshpande Foundation for any further information or leave a comment and we would get it clarified from the Microsoft Ventures team.

Image Credit : Deshpande Foundation & Microsoft