Microsoft Announces Limited Preview AI and Robotics Toolkit at the Build Developer Summit

Microsoft intends to build an end-to-end toolkit for AI & robotics development. The company rolled out a limited preview AI & robotics toolkit here at its Seattle Build Developer Conference. The preview is the maiden component of what the company wants to build in the future and consists of avenues to build Intelligent Assistants that can drive physical systems. These assistants will leverage pre-existing Microsoft AI & Azure tools. At the conference, the company presented a strong argument highlighting that Machine Teaching will emerge as the next huge frontier of AI. Machine Teaching is the ability to empower AI with capabilities of teaching like humans without using any code.

Toyota and Sarcos are the first adopters to this platform, developing forklifts and search and rescue robots respectively.

“I think AI has to break away from being something that only AI experts can work on; otherwise the application of the AI and its impact on the world is going to be very limited. I think we have to get to the place where it’s not that 10,000 AI experts in the world are the only ones who can actually apply AI in different scenarios across many vertical domains,” Microsoft VP for Business AI Gurdeep Pall told a popular science daily.

Key technologies that the platform will be built on are –

• Microsoft Azure IoT
• Reinforcement learning
• Airsim
• Robotics Operating System (launched for Windows 10 last year)
• Technology from Bonsai – The company was acquired by Microsoft last year

 

Microsoft has been making major announcements in advancing its technology. Just last week the company announced –

• Azure Machine Learning equipped with drag-and-drop tools
• Expansive blockchain capabilities
• Bolstering for HoloLens 2

With massive AI adoption happening across the global enterprise, Microsoft is ensuring that its offerings attract large corporations for business development.