Highlights from 2019 tech conferences - F8 and Build
Contributed By - Hari Gottipati
Within a 10 days gap, the three biggest tech companies revealed their ambitions and roadmaps filled with a bunch of emerging technologies at their annual developer conferences. As usual, the saga started with Facebook F8 conference on April 30th, followed by Microsoft Build in May 2nd week and continued with Google I/O in the same week. The saga usually ends with Apple WWDC and this year it's in the 1st week of June. What Apple is going to announce is yet to be unknown, but Facebook, Microsoft, and Google already announced their grand vision centered around three themes - AI, Cloud, and Privacy.
Facebook F8
Facebook announced a bunch of new things at the F8 conference. On the AI front, Facebook announced two new tools - Ax and PoTorch. While PoTorch is a Bayesian optimization library based on Facebook's PyTorch, Ax is a platform for managing, deploying and automating AI experiments. It helps AI developers experiment with adjusting things like learning rates and dropouts to find the optimal configuration for these models. Also, Facebook made significant progress in using AI to combat abuse, hate speech, spreading misinformation and election interference.
Facebook old logo on the left and new logo on the right. Image credit: Facebook Newsroom
A big design overhaul is coming to the web and mobile apps to easily find and discover the groups and events. Codenamed "FB5" with the updated icon, the change is going to be focused on communities and private connections. In groups, ‘Meet new Friends’ feature lets you connect with the group members whom you share interests and on the marketplace, a peer-to-peer shopping hub lets you pay and ship directly through the social network platform.
Facebook messenger added a new social feature - ‘watch together' which lets Facebook users enjoy the same videos simultaneously irrespective of where they are in the world. On the Messenger bot platform, it announced a new feature, 'appointment-booking' which could help customers book appointments with 40 million businesses that use Messenger platform.
Instagram has added three major features - shopping with curated product collections, donation stickers in stories, and a revamped camera interface, “create mode”, which lets users post stories with stickers, GIFs, and other content without sharing a photo or video.
WhatsApp is getting a new SDK (software development kit) to integrate the third-party app's verification on iOS and Android. With this, third-party apps can enable users to choose the option to use WhatsApp to receive verification codes when signing up.
On the AR/VR front, Oculus Quest and Oculus Rift S are two new headsets that will be shipping on May 21st in 22 countries with a price tag $399 each.
Microsoft Build
As I usually say, you don't need to be a data scientist to build Machine Learning based applications. More than 1.3 million developers, many without specific AI or data science skills, currently use Azure Cognitive Services to build intelligent apps that can see, hear, speak, understand and even begin to reason.
Image credit: Microsoft presskit
On top of these cognitive tools, Microsoft is adding a new category called Decision which includes Personalizer - enhances user experience using reinforcement learning; Conversation transcription which improves meeting efficiency by transcribing conversations in real-time, enabling all participants to engage fully, capturing who said what and when so you can quickly follow up on next steps; Form Recognizer which uses advanced machine learning technology to quickly and more accurately extract text and data from business’s forms and documents; Ink Recognizer provides applications with the ability to recognize digital handwriting, common shapes, and the layout of inked documents.
Microsoft announced a fully-managed blockchain service Azure Blockchain Service, with it, users can create and deploy a permissioned blockchain network and manage consortium policies using an intuitive interface. With a few simple clicks, built-in governance enables developers to add new members, set permissions, monitor network health and activity, and execute governed, private interactions.
Microsoft also announced its new Fluid Framework, a technology for building a new class of shared, interactive experiences on the web. It will allow multi-person co-authoring on web and document content at a speed and scale not yet achieved in the industry. Then it enables content to be deconstructed and reconstructed into modular components and allowing intelligent agents to work alongside people to co-author, provide photo suggestions, translate text, fetch content, suggest edits, perform compliance checks, and more.
Image credit: Microsoft presskit
Also, Cortana is moving beyond the restrictions of self-contained commands to a conversational experience. With the help of acquired company Semantic Machines, Microsoft researchers built breakthrough new conversational AI technology that will power a new class of multi-turn, multi-domain, and multi-agent experiences. You can ask Cortana, ”schedule a cram session with Nicholas from 9:00 to 1:30 today. And uh, we're gonna need a room in Bellevue. And, push back my one-on-one with Anjali to tomorrow".
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently demonstrated how Starbucks delivers its signature customer experience with Azure. Within the Starbucks mobile app, customers receive personalized order suggestions generated via a reinforcement learning (a type of machine learning) platform that is built and hosted in Microsoft Azure. Based on local store inventory, popular selections, weather, time of day, community preferences and previous orders, Starbucks data scientists are delivering thoughtful recommendations for food and drinks on their mobile app using Azure cognitive platform. 6 million active Starbucks Rewards members are more likely to get suggestions for items they will enjoy. For example, if a customer order history has more dairy-free beverages, the platform can suggest dairy-free food and drinks.
Google I/O will be covered in next month's article along with Apple WWDC.