Microsoft's virtual assistant, Cortana has already found its way to the smart home, as core to a smart speaker from Harman Kardon. But Satya Nadella, the company's CEO, is also looking at how Cortana can leverage the voice recognition, speech synthesis, and natural language processing (NLP) to power the office.
At Microsoft Build developer conference, the company offered a glimpse of Cortana's inroad to the workplace, with the virtual assistant support for more fluid, back-and-forth conversations.
The keynote was a demo of an office worker managing calendar via a mobile device powered by Cortana. While Cortana provided answers to numerous questions and was also able to carry out specific actions in continuous interaction that lasted for over 30 “turns” - including a view of upcoming plans, schedules and rescheduling of meetings, checking for availability and booking of rooms.
It isn't coming as a surprise, as Gartner Research has predicted that 25 percent of digital workers will be using virtual assistants on daily basis in 2021; this will provide an opportunity for SMBs to use virtual assistant technology to take care of more auxiliary office processes, which in turn will give customers more time to attend to other issues, as it will reduce delays in office communications.
Cortana's ability to engage in complex and dynamic interactions has greatly improved following Microsoft’s acquisition of Semantic Machines, a conversational AI startup which has lend to keeping track of context on iterations.
Semantic Machines input helped Microsoft to push forward to the boundaries of what is possible in natural language interfaces, and further expanding in conversational AI with its digital assistant Cortana, while using machine learning to enable users to discover and access information and services in a much more natural way, with less effort.
Microsoft is in a vantage position to win the race for Office dominance, as it already boasts of the most popular business apps with Office 365. But Microsoft will still need to prove it can deliver on the promise of more natural conversations.
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