Microsoft PowerApps and Flow are generally available starting tomorrow

- James Phillips - Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Business Applications, Platform and Intelligence
Photo of various different devices, including a tablet and three phones

After a rewarding journey hand-in-hand with the many customers and partners who participated in our preview programs (thank you!), we’re excited to announce the general availability of Microsoft PowerApps and Microsoft Flow. Beginning Tuesday, both services will be available to users around the world and in 42 languages. Both PowerApps and Flow will be included with Dynamics 365 and in the subscriptions of millions of Office 365 Enterprise and Business … Read more »

Microsoft Teams, ‘Minecraft: Education Edition,’ Microsoft PowerApps and Flow – oh, my! It’s Weekend Reading, Nov. 4 edition

- Suzanne Choney - Microsoft News Center Staff
Microsoft Teams, Office 365

We said “hello” this week to some new team members, including Microsoft Teams, “Minecraft: Education Edition” and Microsoft PowerApps and Flow, met Microsoft employees and the people they help through the Microsoft Giving Campaign, and ushered in new era of open source hardware development at cloud speed. BAM! Microsoft Teams, a chat-based workspace in Office 365, debuted in preview. Most of us work in teams, but we’re not always together … Read more »

Windows 10 Creators Update and Surface Studio empower individual creativity, Surface Dial is an all-around nifty device, and every gamer can be a broadcaster – Weekend Reading, Oct. 28 edition

- Suzanne Choney - Microsoft News Center Staff
surface_studio-desktop_16x9_gif_v21

We’re all creators, whether it means adding a personalized emoji to a message, dreaming up a new world in “Minecraft” or reimagining a remodel of a house or office. That’s why the announcement of the next Windows 10 update, Windows 10 Creators Update, was the big news of the week, but there was plenty more. Let’s go! Windows 10 Creators Update coming in early 2017: The free update to Windows … Read more »

Windows 10 Creators Update, Surface Studio and more unleash a new wave of creativity

- Microsoft Corporate Blogs
Photo of new Microsoft Studio with colorful mountains and sunset displayed on its monitor

On Wednesday, Microsoft shared its aspiration to empower a new wave of creativity with the Windows 10 Creators Update, the introduction of Surface Studio and Surface Dial, a new Surface Book and more. “With Windows 10, our goal is to have the effect of the Gutenberg press on this next generation of computing, enabling 3D creativity, mixed reality, and eSports and game broadcasting for everyone,” says Terry Myerson, executive vice … Read more »

Newly updated Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit can help speed advances in deep learning

- Microsoft Corporate Blogs
Photo of Frank Seide standing at the top of a stairway at Microsoft

Microsoft has released an updated version of Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit, a system for deep learning that is used to speed advances in areas such as speech and image recognition and search relevance on CPUs and NVIDIA GPUs. The toolkit, previously known as CNTK, was initially developed by computer scientists at Microsoft who wanted a tool to do their own research more quickly and effectively. It quickly moved beyond speech and … Read more »

Imagine Cup rings in its 15th anniversary with $100,000 top prize

- Steve Guggenheimer - Corporate Vice President, Developer Experience & Evangelism and Chief Evangelist, Microsoft
Photo of three Imagine Cup competitors on stage, two with a fist raised as if celebrating, with a trophy in the foreground

One of the best parts of my job as Microsoft’s chief evangelist is the opportunity it affords me to interact with students. They represent the next generation of innovators, makers and builders, and it is their creativity and hunger to drive change that will help shape what our tomorrow will look like. With that in mind, I am excited to announce the launch of the 2017 Imagine Cup – now … Read more »

Flash to the future: Major breakthrough in speech recognition, Bing and Azure use an AI supercomputer in the cloud — Weekend Reading: Oct. 21 edition

- Athima Chansanchai
Microsoft researchers from the Speech & Dialog research group include, from back left, Wayne Xiong, Geoffrey Zweig, Xuedong Huang, Dong Yu, Frank Seide, Mike Seltzer, Jasha Droppo and Andreas Stolcke. (Photo by Dan DeLong)

In this edition of Weekend Reading, we have stories on a historic milestone in speech recognition, an AI supercomputer in the cloud and significant advancements for the Government Cloud. Microsoft has made a major breakthrough in speech recognition, creating a technology that understands a conversation as well as a person does. In a paper published Monday, a team of researchers and engineers in Microsoft Artificial Intelligence and Research reported a speech … Read more »

Microsoft releases 2016 Corporate Social Responsibility report

- Susan Hauser - Corporate Vice President, Business and Corporate Responsibility, Microsoft
Photo of a girl running outside, with a lake and greenery in the background

At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. We care deeply about how we achieve that mission and our lasting impact on the world. Across the company, we are working to apply the power of technology to ensure corporate responsibility, safeguard human rights and protect our planet. This commitment is central to why many of our employees come to work … Read more »

Historic milestone: Microsoft researchers achieve human parity in conversational speech recognition

- Athima Chansanchai
Microsoft researchers from the Speech & Dialog research group include, from back left, Wayne Xiong, Geoffrey Zweig, Xuedong Huang, Dong Yu, Frank Seide, Mike Seltzer, Jasha Droppo and Andreas Stolcke. (Photo by Dan DeLong)

Microsoft has made a major breakthrough in speech recognition, creating a technology that understands a conversation as well as a person does. In a paper published Monday, a team of researchers and engineers in Microsoft Artificial Intelligence and Research reported a speech recognition system that makes the same or fewer errors than professional transcriptionists.  The researchers reported a word  error rate (WER) of 5.9 percent, down from the 6.3 percent WER … Read more »

Alberto Cairo, Power BI & the rise of data journalism

- Thomas Kohnstamm
Data journalist Alberto Cairo working at his computer

From the election of Pope Francis to the passing of Nelson Mandela to Miley Cyrus’ MTV #twerk heard ’round the world, 2013 was full of big headlines and viral hits. Yet The New York Times’ top story of the year was the humble result of a vocabulary survey of 350,000 randomly selected Americans conducted by a then-intern at the paper. Instead of presenting these findings in a written article, “How … Read more »

Football tech, election predictions and perfectly fitting jeans – Weekend Reading: Oct. 14 edition

- Susanna Ray
seahawks

Weather woes, election exhaustion, darkening days – there’s lots of justification this weekend for curling up on the couch with nibbles and beverages. Or for leaping off it and screaming at your television. Either way, the NFL is sure to oblige with some distracting entertainment. And Microsoft Surface tablets will come in handy on both sides of the TV screen. Surface Pro tablets are going into their fourth season helping … Read more »