Artificial intelligence is a big focus for Microsoft Corp., and at its AI-focused event in San Francisco today, it announced a raft of smarter features across its core products, including Office 365, its Cortana digital assistant and Bing search engine.

Bing trails far behind Google LLC in the search engine market, sitting at less than 6 percent to Google’s 81 percent. Microsoft is hoping its intelligent features in Bing will allow it to stand out — even against a rival that’s widely seen as a leader in AI.

With the rise of fake news and misinformation, one of Bing’s main changes is being smarter about the information it displays and becoming more conversational and nuanced. “At Microsoft, we believe it’s important to understand where information comes from,” said Kristina Behr, partner design and planning program manager for Microsoft’s AI and research.

Microsoft’s digital assistant also faces strong competition from established players such as Amazon.com Inc.’s Alexa and Google Assistant. Microsoft will hope its widening capabilities for Cortana, including “skills chaining” will allow it to bridge the gap with its competitors.   

These updates follow Microsoft’s introduction of a public preview of Whiteboard, its collaboration app for teams. Among other features, the app uses AI to recognize freeform drawings and transform them into standard shapes. They also come the same week that Microsoft pledged an additional $50 million to its “AI for Earth” climate change program. 

Bing

The updates for Microsoft’s search engine will allow it to make better use of machine learning, object recognition and various other AI techniques.

To ensure users are comfortable with the search results they receive from Bing, the search engine will now show multiple perspectives and multiple sources, culled from a list of preapproved news sources.

To avoid clicking on multiple sources to confirm details, Bing will now aggregate across multiple reputable sources to validate an answer.

For search queries that have opposing perspectives, Bing will present the information of both viewpoints, so users can see the information upfront before clicking on results. For questions that have multiple answers, Bing will present the information in a carousel.

“It’s not only that you see more answers pop up to the top of the search results, but you’ll get more perspectives as well,” said Harry Shum, head of AI at Microsoft. “Search has really moved on. It’s no longer 10 blue links.”

Another new feature is “perspective engine” (pictured in main image) which will make sense of numbers or countries with similar comparisons, for example, the number of calories in an ice cream or the size of Afghanistan.

Partnership with Reddit

A new partnership with Reddit Inc. will add Reddit information to Bing search results, including information from top conversations, communities and Reddit AMAs (Ask Me Anything) sessions.

Intelligent image search

Bing Image Search uses computer vision and object recognition to allow users to shop for similar items across the web. The latest update will now allow users to isolate an item in a photo and search for that specific item on the web.

Cortana

Earlier this week, Microsoft announced support for its Cortana digital assistant to access Google Calendar data. In addition to being able to access calendar appointments and trigger reminders, users can also use voice commands with Cortana-powered speakers like Harman Kardon Inc.’s Invoke device, to access their calendar.

New features for Cortana include the ability for the digital assistant to sort and summarize important emails across both Gmail and Outlook accounts.

Cortana’s new skills chaining feature will suggest a follow-up skill based on the action you have just completed. For example, if you are booking event tickets, Cortana will automatically suggest adding the event details to your calendar.

Microsoft has also landed its first partnership to integrate Cortana into a third-party Android launcher. The integration of Cortana into Cheetah Mobile Inc.’s CM Launcher will provide voice control features like making calls, searching the web and more. The CM Launcher with Cortana integration is currently available in beta.

Office 365

Using machine learning, Office Insights in Excel will automatically analyze the spreadsheet’s data, highlight any trends or outliers it detects and create visuals like pivot tables and trend charts. Insights in Excel will roll out in a preview to Office insiders this month.

Acronyms in Word will leverage the Microsoft Graph and machine learning to help people understand acronyms commonly used in their business. Acronyms will scan through documents and emails and provide definitions for terms that have previously been defined. This feature will roll out to Word Online for Office 365 commercial subscribers in 2018.

Microsoft is also expanding its AI-powered tools in Outlook with the introduction of its digital assistant into the mobile app with its new “time to leave” functionality. When you have a meeting or appointment coming up, Outlook will send a notification to alert you when it’s time to leave. It will take into account your current location, the event location and real-time traffic information and provide both public transit and driving directions. The new feature will roll out to Outlook iOS users in the insider program this month in markets where Cortana is available.  

Finally, Microsoft is expanding on the features it rolled out earlier this year for OneDrive and SharePoint that allows for the automatic detection of content within images and detect whiteboards, screenshots and receipts. The new functionality will now allow for the automatic extraction of searchable text from images. At a later date when you need the receipt, business card or screenshot, simply search for a term on the image, such as the name of the restaurant or what you ate, and the receipt will be located, with no need to remember where you stored it. This functionality is currently only available in English and will be available for all Office 365 commercial subscribers by the end of December.

Images: Microsoft