t is a strategy which we have been hearing a lot about over the last
couple of months, and the inclusion of Semantic Machines adds further
ammunition to the Microsoft AI garrison.
This acquisition is a perfect example of where CEO Satya Nadella
wants to take the Microsoft business. When Nadella inherited the
Microsoft throne, the business was in a trough, relying on a decaying
legacy business while carelessly investing to chase segments which had
already boomed. The Nadella strategy was to get out in front of the
crowd with a heavy emphasis on cloud computing in the early days, and
now a more acute focus on artificial intelligence. Semantic Machines
builds on this vision.
“We are excited to announce today that we have acquired Semantic
Machines Inc., a Berkeley, California-based company that has developed a
revolutionary new approach to building conversational AI,” said David
Ku, CTO of Microsoft AI & Research. “Their work uses the power of
machine learning to enable users to discover, access and interact with
information and services in a much more natural way, and with
significantly less effort.”
The idea of conversational AI is a simple one. Take AI interactions
from limited and specific questions to conversation based outcomes. With
more of a focus on conversational AI, offerings like Cortana, the Azure
Bot Service and Microsoft Cognitive Services will be able to become
more intuitive, taking actions based on context and more nuanced
enquiries. It becomes a much more natural interaction and will
ultimately drive the normalization of the technology.
This is where the Semantic Machines acquisition could prove to be a
valuable one, as it builds on the Microsoft mission statement. The
objective of Semantic Machines is to develop a ‘new,
language-independent technology platform that goes beyond understanding
commands to understanding conversations’. While this does sound like a
blue-sky ambition, the task is separated into several areas including
extracting semantic intent from interactions, deep-learning models to
enhance the concept of context, speech recognition, speech synthesis and
reinforcement learning.
The conversational AI strategy does look like it is becoming a useful
one for the Microsoft team, especially in the telco space, where
operators are trying to reverse years of negative customer service
experience. While it is not reasonable to assume 100% of customers would
welcome virtual customer service agents, progress with conversational
AI will make the virtual agents more intuitive, broadening acceptance,
while also making them more useful.
TIM is one telco which has grasped onto the Microsoft AI experience for its customer services,
and we suspect it won’t be the last. For industries which have
traditionally struggled in the customer services space, the telcos being
top of this list, Microsoft’s conversational AI department is certainly
one to keep an eye on.
