''Microsoft’s secret weapons to get back to the top of the tech mountain: machine learning and artificial intelligence, some of the company’s top R&D brains said Monday.
Harry Shum, head of technology and research at Microsoft, said the big trends that his team is working on involves how a person interacts with a computer. “We are now moving from the personal computer to personal computing,” he said at Microsoft’s Think Next 2014 conference in Tel Aviv.
Microsoft is investing heavily in “invisible user interface” technology, said Yoram Yaakobi, who heads up Microsoft’s research and development center in Israel. Yaakobi said people in the future won’t need to touch, type or speak to their devices — the devices will “know” what we want them to do before we ask. He called it “UI.Next.”
“User interface started with the command prompt, moved to graphics, then touch, and then gestures,” Yaakobi said. “It’s now moving to invisible UI, where there is nothing to operate. The tech around you understands you and what you want to do” — and that’s what people expect, he said. “We’re putting this at the forefront of our efforts.”
Cortana, the virtual personal assistant Microsoft announced last week, is part of the company’s push into machine learning, Yaakobi and Shum said. Microsoft has positioned Cortana as a challenger to Apple’s Siri and Google Now''.
