AI is embedded in so many services and products that we forget we are already in the making, not the begining.

1. “AI will augment our humanity—it will give each of us “superpowers” to meet challenges of all
kinds—including some of our biggest ones.”
—Harry Shum, EVP, AI and Research

2. What is AI?
1 - Wheel

3. 2 - Printing Press
3 - Aircraft
4 - Rocket
Think about the history of human innovation.
• The wheel
• The printing press
• The steam engine
• Human flight
• Rockets and satellites
These innovations were “accelerators” that supercharged human progress in countless other areas.
Artificial Intelligence may be the biggest accelerator of all because it not only extends human
physical capabilities but empowers them in new ways.

4. AI has the potential to be bigger than the PC wave and bigger than the Internet.
This isn’t another step in the digital age. It’s the ultimate objective that was imagined by people like
Alan Turing years before the first computer was built.
Finding a cure for cancer, bringing education to the masses, helping people with disabilities, finding
solutions to environmental challenges—all of these things are possible with Artificial Intelligence.
The history and evolution of AI
When Bill Gates created Microsoft Research 25 years ago, he had a vision of creating a general AI—
computers that one day could see, hear, talk, and understand human beings.

5. Even back then, Microsoft was building the foundation for the future of the digital revolution. The
first three groups in Microsoft Research were Natural Language, Speech, and Computer Vision—all
critical disciplines of the advancement of AI.
AI has had many starts and stops. So what is different now? There have been three breakthroughs
that put AI on the fast track:
1. Big data—Internet and sensors everywhere.
2. Massive computing power—especially through the cloud.
3. Breakthrough algorithms—computers can do more on their own with deep learning!
AI is everywhere! It's already powering your recommendation engine. It’s guarding your credit card
against fraud, personalizing your newsfeed, and connecting your home. Elements of AI are all
around and have found a place in everyday life.
“Things that weren’t possible even two years ago are possible today because of breakthroughs
happening right here at Microsoft.”

6. —Harry Shum, EVP, AI and Research
The Artificial Intelligence and Research team continues to advance AI in all areas.
Computer Vision—Microsoft has won many awards in image recognition competitions like Image
Net 1K. This was accomplished by training neural networks with a depth of 152 layers. These deep
residual nets give us much greater accuracy to correctly identify images over 96% of the time. This
has helped products like HoloLens. We are also getting better at facial recognition.
Speech—Computers have begun learning to see like us, but now they're learning to listen and
recognize speech like us, too. Microsoft became the first to reach human parity in speech
recognition with the Switchboard dataset. This goal seemed very distant just a few years ago.
Language—The world has more than 6,500 languages. With speech advancements, we are also
making gains in natural language. Microsoft Translator can now simultaneously support 100 people
speaking nine languages.
Knowledge—We’re now getting to the point where computers can do some of what people can
do: see, hear, and begin to attach words to the world around them. And we’re not just talking
perception, but cognition too. AI connects ideas and concepts to the people, places, and things in
our world.

7. Our AI portfolio is powering products today
We are bringing a four-pronged approach to democratizing AI.
Agents—Intelligent agents like Cortana, Xiaoice, Rinna, chatbots, and others will change how we
actually use technology for our work and life.

8. Applications—We’re going to infuse every application with intelligence. It’s happening today,
working on major Microsoft products today from Windows to Office.
Services—We are offering Microsoft Cognitive Services with 25 APIs to help developers, providing
them with AI capabilities . . . speech, language, knowledge, search, and more.
Infrastructure—With Azure, we’re building the world’s most powerful AI supercomputer with the
intent of making it available to anyone on the Microsoft cloud.
What does the future hold?
It’s not just about IQ, we need EQ too.
We are making some great progress across all the elements of AI. But we have much to do to build
General AI.
Today, people are forced to understand computers. We need computers to understand us. Core to
this is two-way conversation, and it is hard for computers to speak “human.”
We call it Conversational AI, and it is the next step in human-machine interaction. It could be as
game changing as the emergence of the graphical user interface, which made PCs accessible to
everyone.
When computers can speak “human,” every human can speak with and collaborate with computers.
Today, AI is all about IQ. But EQ—emotional understanding—is just as important as IQ to building
successful AI.
This is where agents like Cortana and chatbots like Zo (US), Xiaoice (China), and Rinna (Japan) come
in. With EQ and IQ, intelligent agents will make computing truly personal. They’ll know us—who we

9. are and even how we feel. They’ll anticipate our needs and keep us on schedule. And, they will not
be attached to devices; instead, they’ll be wherever we are, whenever we need them.

10. 5 - Play Xiaoice video1
AI for humanity
6 - Education
1http://resnet/fullVideo.aspx?id=38925

11. 7 - Play Xiaoying video2
8 - Abilities
9 - Play SwiftKey video3
AI may also make humans more human by augmenting our humanity. We have made incredible
progress in the field over the past 30 years, and the pace of discovery is growing exponentially. AI
has the potential to improve society in ways that we can’t even imagine in almost every discipline.
The Microsoft Research team is looking closely at the ways AI can change the world 5, 10, 20 years
from now. Solving these great challenges will lead to innovations we cannot imagine today. Here are
some areas where we’re making progress:
Education—AI has the potential to change the way we learn and provide unprecedented access and
resources to people in need. Teachers can’t scale to the masses who need education today. AI can
transform and personalize a person’s education based on unique learning style. Xiaoying (chatbot) is
a virtual English tutor free to anyone in China via a WeChat public account. Xiaoying now has more
than 80,000 users and is working with China Daily’s bilingual WeChat account, where readers can
test their English vocabulary.
2http://resnet/fullVideo.aspx?id=38924
3https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCWiTs6lrbo

12. Abilities—Another challenge for humanity is helping people with disabilities to achieve their full
potential. Our SwiftKey team in the UK, who is best known for its predictive keyboard, saw an
opportunity to help. It used this technology to develop an app to help students who were nonverbal.
The world is full of challenges. But we are optimists! By collaborating with AI, we can make faster
and more profound progress in nearly every imaginable field of human endeavor.
AI fuels our mission
The future of AI is unfolding and we still have a very long way to go. But our vision to bring the
benefits of AI to everyone is what drives us.
Curiosity. Caring. Creativity. And the universal desire to make the world better.
All around the world, the Artificial Intelligence and Research team is leading the way, working to
fulfill our mission—to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve
more—with AI.
Questions?
Contact AI+R Communications (aircomms@microsoft.com4
)
4mailto:aircomms@microsoft.com