Microsoft releases 2016 Corporate Social Responsibility report

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

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

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

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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 »

Helping customers accelerate their digital transformation with intelligent business applications

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In July we unveiled a new approach to business apps, and today I’m excited to share more about the capabilities coming to customers in Dynamics 365 – our new cloud service with purpose-built apps that enable you to address specific business needs (like sales automation, operations or customer service) and start small with the assurance that the solution can grow as your needs do. Powered by advanced analytics and machine … Read more »

Doubling European cloud capacity, investing in startups, more Minecraft fun — Weekend Reading: Oct. 7 edition

Last week’s big AI announcements eclipsed a lot of other news at Microsoft. This week, we march forward with all sorts of exciting announcements from cloud to startups to nano technology and gaming. Hold on tight as Weekend Reading gives you the light-speed tour of recent happenings at Microsoft. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and president Brad Smith revealed that the company has invested over $3 billion across Europe to date … Read more »

Microsoft Ventures: A portfolio with impact

With the official debut of Microsoft Ventures in late May, the momentum is already underway in our first few months. Our aim is to use this fund to place bets on innovators who align to our investment focus – cutting-edge technologies that better enable digital transformation. The reception we’ve received, from both the entrepreneurs who are aligned with our ambitions and the VCs who see us as a valuable partner, … Read more »

Microsoft increases European cloud investment to $3 billion, unveils cloud policy recommendations

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3-9-2016
Picture shows Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, speaking to a group of 2000 business leaders, developers and entrepreneurs in Dublin, Ireland today, shared new details about cloud investments made in Europe, saying the company has more than doubled cloud capacity on the continent in the past year, investing more than USD $3 billion to date. Microsoft also launched a new book, A Cloud for Global Good, that outlines a roadmap for working with policymakers to build a cloud that is trusted, responsible and inclusive. The remarks came at the start of a four-day trip to Europe to meet with business and government leaders in Ireland, France, Germany and the UK.Pic:Naoise Culhane-no fee

Reflecting the significant investment Microsoft Corp. is making in cloud computing in Europe, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and president Brad Smith on Monday shared new details about how this momentum is taking shape. Nadella stated that Microsoft has more than doubled its cloud capacity in Europe in the past year, noted that the company has invested over $3 billion (USD) across Europe to date, and shared that Microsoft intends to … Read more »

Expanding and democratizing artificial intelligence, transforming businesses at Ignite — Weekend Reading: Sept. 30 edition

Collage of people working in science, technology, space and health industries

This week delivered plenty of powerful news from Microsoft, from game-changing announcements about artificial intelligence to new avenues for business transformation demonstrated at Microsoft Ignite 2016 in Atlanta. Here’s the highlights. Microsoft announced on Thursday that it’s forming a new group to expand its artificial intelligence efforts by bringing together the company’s world-class research organization with more than 5,000 computer scientists and engineers. Harry Shum, a computer vision luminary and … Read more »

The next milestone in Microsoft’s AI journey

This week at Microsoft Ignite, we showed how we are infusing artificial intelligence (AI) broadly across Microsoft to help our customers. Our approach to this fundamental shift is to democratize AI and to make it accessible and valuable to everyone. We’re focused on building an AI stack spanning infrastructure, services, apps and agents and reaching key customer audiences — consumers, enterprises, developers. We are creating tools to make it easier … Read more »