Microsoft Office Users Are Getting AI, But May Not Know It

Over the past few years, Microsoft has quietly added a number of artificial intelligence (AI) features to Office 365 , but my gauge is that most Part users either don't know these features exist, or just take them for granted.

At terminal year's Ignite conference, I saw a number of new AI features, and amongst these were notable new features for PowerPoint and Outlook. But this year, many of those features have deepened and a diverseness of new tools have been added, some announced at the recent Inspire briefing and others announced just this week.

Kirk Gregersen, who heads the programme direction team inside Role, explained that the team's goal is to add together "intelligence into the production in a way that users don't have to understand to benefit from [it]." This involves using a lot of information the company has in the course of its "cognition graph"—all of the information yous store in documents and email, including what some companies accept agreed to share with Microsoft—every bit well as taking advantage of both the cloud and the AI experience. "Without the movement to the cloud, we couldn't exist doing what nosotros are doing," Gregersen said, explaining that many of these concepts accept been around since the 1980s or 90s, just that they weren't possible without all the data that is now in the deject.

Gregersen said the production squad now works deeply with Microsoft Research, led by executive vice president of Artificial Intelligence & Research Harry Shum, in a way that it couldn't have in the past. Gregersen referred to these new AI features as "gifts from Harry's org" and said they have enabled scenarios the product teams accept envisioned for years.

Some of the new features are fairly obvious, such equally the "focused" inbox in Outlook, while others are less noticeable. (Note over again that non every user has all these features yet. I'll recap the update policies at the end of this postal service.)

Word Tackles Writing Way

In contempo months, Discussion has added a multifariousness of new proofing tools. The spelling and grammar features take been significantly enhanced, and they take a notably dissimilar await.

Among the changes are suggestions that are based in function by contextual ranking, and a "read aloud" characteristic, which is designed to help those with visual impairments.

About obvious is the new "gold squiggle," which suggests fashion changes within your documents. Each new monthly release adds more of these features, which range from full general way critiques to helping you make sure you use more inclusive language, such as identifying gender-specific terms or terms that have different geopolitical meanings. Many of these are turned off by default at nowadays, and then users may not be aware they exist. (These settings are listed under File, Options, Proofing, Writing Way as shown in the graphic beneath). They are interesting and potentially quite useful tools.

Grammar & Style option

Gregersen said this represents a use of AI wherein information technology takes something that was solely rules-based and adds context awareness. In the future, he said, it volition be easier to see how this could be used in LinkedIn resumes, as well as become more than personalized, so yous could have information technology ignore certain mode issues.

PowerPoint Turns Text into Presentations

Many of the virtually interesting features involve PowerPoint. Last year, Microsoft demonstrated a new option chosen Designer, in which PowerPoint can have a variety of slides yous accept and evidence you alternatives for different designs based on your content.

In new versions, Designer has improved how it does prototype assay in the background, and this helps information technology to recognize salient regions of a photo, for things similar facial recognition (then it doesn't crop out faces), or extracting color to assistance determine the color tone for the rest of a presentation. In improver, the company is tracking which designs people choose, and using a ranking algorithm similar to that used by the Bing search engine to propose the most appropriate choices.

My favorite new characteristic involves taking the text yous type and automatically turning it into a visual, or typing a number of steps in a process and turning that into a visual procedure menses. This was unveiled last year (under the proper noun "SmartArts"), and the company has been updating it over time.

Timeline

Similarly, some other new feature turns a bulleted list with dates into a timeline, and it's quite cool. It's long been possible to create such visuals in PowerPoint, but it was time consuming and required a flake of artistic sensibility. This feature makes information technology much easier.

In add-on, final year PowerPoint added a characteristic chosen Quick First, aimed by and large at students, which, if you blazon in a topic, creates a basic outline of a presentation for you, using information and images from the web that are available nether the Creative Commons license. This characteristic, too, has been enhanced.

Translator - Italian Subtitle

Maybe the flashiest new characteristic, all the same, is the ability to translate a presentation into another linguistic communication in real-fourth dimension. Presentation Translator was starting time demonstrated in the keynote at this yr'south Build conference, and it looks quite impressive.

This is an add-in for PowerPoint that lets you requite your presentation in one language, but lets the audition follow it in another language through subtitles. Translator currently works in ten languages when speaking, and can display subtitles in almost sixty languages. It is too designed for accessibility, to aid deafened or hearing-impaired people in the audience. Translator runs against a microservice in the cloud.

Other interesting features in this vein include an pick to generate alt-text that takes an prototype and runs it confronting a microservice so that visually impaired people tin besides follow along. This concept has been around for a while, but recent additions apply more than corporate training data and images. Gregersen said the recognition charge per unit has improved by 30 per centum against the types of images professional users use.

Other Tools

Final fall, Microsoft announced MyAnalytics, a tool that analyzes your calendar and electronic mail, and can tell you how much of your day is spent handing electronic mail across all of your devices, every bit well every bit how yous are handling that mail. For now, this characteristic volition only be available to enterprise customers with the loftier-finish E5 license.

Update Schedule

When individuals run across the various features I've described in part depends on which version of Office 365 they are using. Consumers and SMB customers (Office 365 Business) by default get the current channel with monthly updates. Enterprise customers (Office 365 ProPlus and above) are on the deferred channel by default. Until recently, enterprise customers typically got updates iii times a twelvemonth; Microsoft recently announced it will at present release these twice a year (targeting March and September). Such customers thus typically don't see new features until 6 to 12 months subsequently consumers. As Gregersen explained, enterprise customers want more fourth dimension to train, refresh, program, and test apps for compatibility. But he noted that some enterprise customers do choose to exist on the electric current branch.

Michael J. Miller is main information officer at Ziff Brothers Investments, a individual investment firm. Miller, who was editor-in-chief of PC Magazine from 1991 to 2005, authors this blog for PCMag.com to share his thoughts on PC-related products. No investment communication is offered in this web log. All duties are disclaimed. Miller works separately for a individual investment firm which may at whatever time invest in companies whose products are discussed in this blog, and no disclosure of securities transactions will be made.