Tag: Recent News

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Project xCloud preview to expand to 11 Western European countries

Bringing the Project xCloud preview to gamers across Western Europe is a top priority for us. We know gaming is an important way for people to remain connected, particularly during these times of social distancing, but we also recognize how internet bandwidth has been impacted with strain on regional networks as large volumes of people responsibly stay home and go online.

It has been said too many times, but it’s true we are living in unprecedented times due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. Here at Xbox, we look to our products to bring joy and connection at all times and particularly during these weeks and months when we’re asked to stay at home. We know we’re in this together and the support we can provide one another is of critical importance now more than ever.

Phil Spencer has talked often about what he sees as the unique power of games to bring people together, to entertain, to inspire and connect. We all believe that in our current circumstances that’s even more true, and we hope that the freedom to discover and play with Project xCloud brings even more joy and connection.

Project xCloud, which has continued to grow and evolve since preview started last year, is our game-streaming technology allowing players to play console games from the cloud on an Android phone or tablet. As we promised at  X019 in November, we’ve had our sights set on expanding the Project xCloud preview this year to more countries.

With that in mind, we continue to evaluate the COVID-19 situation and will begin rolling out the Project xCloud preview across 11 Western European countries when we are confident it is sensible to do so. We will take a measured approach to help conserve internet access, beginning the preview in each market with a limited number of people and adding more participants over time.

Upcoming Project xCloud preview countries:

  • Belgium
  • Denmark
  • Finland
  • France
  • Germany
  • Ireland
  • Italy
  • Netherlands
  • Norway
  • Spain
  • Sweden

Today, we’re opening up registration for Android customers in these preview markets and asking players across Western Europe who want to participate in Preview to sign up, then when we’re ready to begin, you’ll receive a notification email with further instructions. We’ll continue to evaluate the situation and will follow up as soon as we can to confirm when selected participants can begin to test the technology and help build the future of game streaming with us. For those interested in joining the Project xCloud preview, please visit www.xbox.com/projectxcloud and register today.

Thank you for your patience at this time. Your participation and feedback is critical as we learn what it means to bring you the very best game streaming platform. We can’t wait to go on this journey with you.

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Microsoft 2020 intern program will be virtual

Four photos of young men and women

At Microsoft, we’re embracing the “new normal” for how we work and live as the world comes together to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. The health and safety of our employees, interns, and their families is our highest priority, which means shifting in-person experiences online and working together to find creative solutions to new challenges.

For more than 30 years, Microsoft has hosted students from around the world as part of our summer internship program. This year, more than 4,000 students had plans to join us — the largest and most diverse class in our history — taking on roles spanning all our functions. And while we’re incredibly disappointed that we won’t be with them on our campuses, we’re committed to creating a meaningful and fun virtual internship experience for each one of them, and remain eager to absorb their energy and learn from them as we always do.

As we prepare to welcome our incoming interns, we’re working to set them up for a remote experience that will provide a rewarding professional development opportunity as well as meaningful connections. We’re fortunate to have the infrastructure and support needed to deliver a world-class remote internship program through onboarding tools like Microsoft Dynamics 365, and collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams. We also recognize that some individuals may be unable to participate in the virtual internship, so we’re providing an opportunity to defer their internship to next year, if needed.

In short order, the program team will begin hosting remote events that focus on building connections, fostering learning, and empowering interns to achieve their goals and uncover their passions. Participants in the program will connect with one another, build community within their teams, and engage with senior leaders across the company through a variety of virtual events. And we’ll empower our interns to co-create their summer experience with us. In the past, they’ve done everything from hosting their own volunteer projects and sharing TED-style talks to creating a musical.

While this experience is not what anyone expected, we’re embracing this opportunity together with our interns to learn from one another and grow. After all, the power of a growth mindset is that every obstacle is an opportunity to succeed. Adversity often creates some of the biggest leaps in innovation, and I predict that this year’s intern class will not only help us shape our virtual experience, they will have a lasting influence on our program for years to come.

Welcome to our upcoming class of 2020 interns, and thank you in advance for your hard work, creative thinking, and won’t-be-stopped attitude.

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How Microsoft Teams safeguards your virtual conversations and protects your privacy

Almost overnight, video conferencing has become a big part of our daily life and work. A few weeks in, my team and I at Microsoft have adjusted to the new reality of seeing each other’s homes, complete with dogs, cats, and other family members. Everyone around the world is now working, learning, and connecting with colleagues, friends, and family through the power of technology. From kitchen tables to living room couches, and from home offices doubling as home schools—people are relying on Microsoft Teams to work and learn.

Businesses large and small are depending on Teams for mission-critical work. First responders are using Teams to communicate when lives depend on it. Governments are turning to Teams to move medical supplies to where they are needed most. Doctors and nurses are using it to consult with patients, and researchers are collaborating on it across continents to find a vaccine. And teachers are using Teams to teach students in entirely new ways. Important moments of human connection, achievement, and celebration have all moved online.

Now more than ever, people need to know that their virtual conversations are private and secure. At Microsoft, privacy and security are never an afterthought. It’s our commitment to you—not only during this challenging time, but always. Here’s how we’re working to earn your trust every day with Microsoft Teams.

We provide privacy and security controls for video conferences in Teams

We offer a variety of privacy and security controls to allow you to manage who participates in your meetings and who has access to meeting information.

For example, you decide who from outside your organization can join your meetings directly, and who should wait in the lobby for someone to let them in. You can also remove participants during a meeting, designate “presenters” and “attendees,” and control which meeting participants can present content. And with guest access, you can add people from outside your organization but still retain control over your data. Moderation allows you to control who is and isn’t allowed to post and share content. And advanced artificial intelligence (AI) monitors chats to help prevent negative behaviors like bullying and harassment.

When recording a meeting, all participants are notified when a recording starts, and online participants can access our privacy notice directly. Recordings are only available to the people on the call or people invited to the meeting. And recordings are stored in a controlled repository that is protected by permissions and encryption.

We safeguard your privacy by design

When you use Microsoft Teams, you are entrusting us with one of your most valuable assets—your data and personal information. Our approach to privacy is grounded in our commitment to giving you transparency over the collection, use, and distribution of your data. Far from an afterthought, privacy is deeply ingrained in our company philosophy and how we build products. Here are our privacy commitments to you.

  • We never use your Teams data to serve you ads.
  • We do not track participant attention or multi-tasking in Teams meetings.
  • Your data is deleted after the termination or expiration of your subscription.
  • We take strong measures to ensure access to your data is restricted and carefully define requirements for responding to government requests for data.
  • You can access your own customer data at any time and for any reason.
  • We offer regular transparency reports on the Transparency Hub, detailing how we have responded to third-party requests for data.

We protect your identity and account information

Multi-factor authentication (MFA), a feature turned on by your IT administrator, protects your username and password by requiring you to provide a second form of verification to prove your identity. This simple, two-step verification process is widely used in many consumer applications today, including banking, and protects you from attacks that take advantage of weak or stolen passwords.

We protect your data and defend against cybersecurity threats

As a leader in security, Microsoft processes more than 8 trillion security signals every day and uses them to proactively protect you from security threats. In Teams, we encrypt data in transit and at rest, storing your data in our secure network of datacenters and using Secure Real-time Transport Protocol (SRTP) for video, audio, and desktop sharing.

We meet more than 90 regulatory and industry standards

To comply with global, national, regional, and industry-specific regulations, Teams supports more than 90 regulatory standards and laws, including HIPAA, GDPR, FedRAMP, SOC, and Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) for the security of students and children.

For more information on the features we’ve built to deliver on these promises, see our detailed post on privacy and security in Microsoft Teams or refer to our Teams product documentation. And to learn more about our approach to security, compliance, and privacy across all our products, including Teams, visit the Microsoft Trust Center.

No matter how you’re using Teams at this extraordinary time to connect with the people that matter most to you for work and in life, we’re committed to continuing to learn and get better each day as we work to help you keep all your conversations private and secure.

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‘Inside Xbox’ returns with its first new episode for 2020

Inside Xbox returns with its first new episode for 2020 tomorrow, Tuesday, April 7, at 2 p.m. PT / 5 p.m. ET.

As with most of the world, we’re working from home at the moment, but we have old and new friends alike who will bring you the latest news on Grounded, Gears Tactics, Sea of Thieves, Xbox Game Pass, some surprises from our ID@Xbox team and more. While we won’t have any new details to share for Xbox Series X, we are excited to sit down with Director of Program Management for Xbox Series X Jason Ronald, to discuss the recently revealed technical specifications and what they mean for gamers.

Following the episode, at approximately 2:40 p.m. PT / 5:40 p.m. ET, Inside Xbox will host a live, first-look at the single-player experience in Grounded. This gameplay stream will broadcast live on Mixer and Twitch directly from the homes of Obsidian’s developers and include a Q&A with their team.

Watch Inside Xbox live Tuesday via Mixer, Twitch, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, or check out highlights and the full show on-demand after it airs. Due to the unique circumstances of broadcasting from home, captions, audio descriptions, and localized subtitles will be available later this week.

Stay safe, everyone.

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Q&A with Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott on his new book about AI and the American dream

Black and white image of Kevin Scott on a white background
Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott. Photo by Brian Smale.

Artificial intelligence is already changing virtually every aspect of our lives, from how we communicate with each other to how we grow our food, and technology experts believe we are just at the beginning of understanding how AI could expand people’s capabilities.

In his new book, “Reprogramming the American Dream,” Kevin Scott, Microsoft’s chief technology officer, looks at how he went from a childhood in rural Virginia to being a leader in the field of AI – and why he thinks there is ample opportunity for people from all walks of life to take advantage of AI to achieve the American dream.

We recently had the opportunity to talk to him about his life, book and career.

You’ve written a new book. What’s it about?

The book is essentially about how we should all think about artificial intelligence as this incredibly powerful tool that we can choose to use to build a better future for all of us and how, in particular, I think artificial intelligence can be really beneficial for folks who live and work in rural and middle America.

How did your upbringing in rural America inform your perspective about the technology industry?

I think I’ve had a lot of good luck over the course of my life. The first bit of good luck was being born to a family and a community in rural, central Virginia, in this little town called Gladys, where I had all of these role models around me who were inventive and creative and tinkerers and entrepreneurs and folks with tons of grit.

I had not just parents but an entire family structure that was super supportive. We didn’t have much. We were sort of a paycheck-to-paycheck family and had moments of true financial hardship throughout my childhood, but my brother and I never even thought that we were lacking anything. And I had this gigantic curiosity that my parents, in a whole bunch of different ways, tried to support.

I remember one of the things that my mom did really early on — I was such a voracious reader, and I don’t know whether folks remember this, but we used to have door-to-door encyclopedia salespeople, and so the World Book Encyclopedia salesperson came to our house one day, and my mom, even though we didn’t have much money, put the World Book Encyclopedias on a payment plan. And I would go into the living room by myself as a little kid and pull these books off of the shelf one by one and just read the encyclopedia. And it was just an incredible thing, given our circumstances, that my mom and dad would’ve done that for me.

How did your dad influence some of the choices that you made later in life?

My dad was maybe the most important role model in my life. He was an awesome, awesome dad, and some of the most important things I learned from him by example. He experienced a bunch of failure, but every time he would just dust himself off, stand back up and go back at it. And that resilience and grit is just such an important thing to have if you are attempting to do something hard or something that’s right outside of the boundaries of your experience. You’re going to fail a lot, and he just taught me that it’s not the worst thing in the world to fail as long as you’re able to pick yourself up and start moving forward again.

But one of the funniest stories about my dad is he was just super determined that I was not going to go into the family business. My great-grandfather, my grandfather and my dad were all in construction, and I went to work for him when I was a teenager. And he would give me the most miserable jobs in the world, like carrying sheaves of shingles up and down a ladder onto hot roofs all day long or running jackhammers to break up basement floors or pushing wheelbarrows full of bricks up hills. He just wanted to show me how hard that life was.

The interesting thing was it actually taught me how much beauty and dignity there was in all of that work. And my hobbies, funny enough, are all very close to this stuff that he did. I love woodworking, I love building things, I love working with my hands.

The really hilarious thing, as he was giving me all of this miserable work, is that I had already decided that I was really, really interested in computers and programming, and I knew that I wanted to go to college. I kept telling him that and he still kept giving me this crap work.

A stack of books in a bookstore
Kevin Scott’s book, Reprogramming the American Dream, will be available Tuesday, April 7.

Do you feel like you achieved the American dream?

Yeah, I think so. I think a big part of the American dream is that you come into society as a child and you are equipped with an education and a set of experiences that prepare you to go do something interesting and valuable in the world, and that you don’t have a set of systemic barriers standing in your way of achieving those goals.

I got a really good education. I went to a really good science and technology Governor’s School in central Virginia. I wish there were more kids who had that opportunity, because it just gave me the conviction to go on to actually earn a set of computer science degrees. And I never felt like I had enormous impediments in my way.

In your book, you raise the idea that technology such as AI can help people in rural America achieve the American dream. How?

When I left academia and took my first job in industry, I did this machine learning project where I had to sit down with a stack of research papers and a bunch of textbooks filled with not necessarily accessible mathematics, and I spent six months coding to build the system that, at the time, did a very useful thing with machine learning.

The machine learning tools are so powerful now that a motivated high school kid could do that same project in maybe a weekend. And that’s an amazing realization to have because it basically means that anybody can pick up these tools and use them to do interesting things.

When I think about the people that I grew up with, these are some of the most ingenious people that I know. I mean, this community is just full of scrappy people who are using all of the tools that are available to them to make a better future for themselves.

And now, they have this new tool which may be the most powerful tool that we’ve ever built. And it’s so exciting to think about what people will do with these tools who are in different contexts and come at problem solving from different angles than those of us who are in the technology industry.

What do you think needs to happen structurally in order for folks in this country who aren’t in the technology industry to see those benefits?

We should do a better job teaching kids the basic concepts of computer science and engineering and machine learning when they’re in middle and high school.

Machine learning makes it so much easier to do sophisticated things with computers than the traditional tools of programming. We have this tool that we are developing internally right now that allows anyone to build computer vision models, and it’s easy enough that my nine-year-old or 11-year-old can use it to easily train a computer vision model to perform a vision task.

So, I think the argument that AI is too complicated for people to get ramped up on is actually not true. I think, in a way, AI is going to turn the task of getting computers to do things for you from a programming task into a teaching task. And we all know how to teach someone how to do a thing. It’s an innate part of our human set of capabilities. And so I think we should definitely be teaching more of these concepts in high school.

And if you want people to be able to participate in the digital economy, you have to, in these rural communities, have broadband.

That’s why things like Microsoft’s Airband program, that’s using some of the white space spectrum that is no longer being used by broadcast television to carry data, is a really fantastic thing. For kids and businesses and workers to be digitally fluent, they have to have network connectivity. You just can’t expect them to fully participate in this new emerging economy without this very basic bit of infrastructure.

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What the disability community can teach us about working remotely

Over the last few weeks, the world at large has taken on many new challenges in daily life. Adopting new ways to work from home, often while parenting and balancing other priorities. It takes time, patience and problem solving. It’s like learning a new language.

We have received questions from across the disability community looking for tools, resources and best practices. Below you’ll see some of our key learnings since transitioning to working from home in early March. We have identified ways to accelerate the learning curve by leaning into our employees expertise and by continuing to prioritize accessibility to ensure that what we deliver is accessible to all our colleagues in these new and shifting circumstances.

Consider this the start of a series with more chapters ahead. Our hope is that by sharing these learnings we can accelerate your new your journey of being accessible, inclusive and productive – no matter where you’re working.

Learn from others with disabilities

The biggest source of knowledge right now are your employees, especially those in your disability employee communities. The insight and learning here will accelerate the learning curve. Three of our employees have already posted articles with details of how they are working day to day pragmatics:

  • Leah Katz-Hernandez, a member of our CEO communications team, shares her experience as a profoundly deaf, visual-only American Sign Language (ASL) user – with tips on how to conduct great productive meetings in the virtual meeting space.
  • Alyson Boote, a staff ASL interpreter, lists her recommendations for at-home remote ASL interpretation including downloadable reference guides.
  • Megan Lawrence, member of our mental health employee resource group, details key tools and imperatives for maintaining emotional wellbeing including use of the toolset, MyAnalytics.

Leverage assistive technology

Now more than ever, accessibility isn’t option – it’s imperative. Online content, conference calls and virtual forums have replaced in person meetings and events for immediate future, and ‘in person’ accommodations that empower people with disabilities to consume that content have understandably reduced or stopped. However, if you embed accessibility into design of virtual or online content, you remove or reduce the potential of exclusion. You have the power to include and accessibility is the key. Here are a few tools at your disposal to assist you:

  • Use Accessibility Insights to check your website, Windows or Android app for accessibility with quick easy guides on how to make them more accessible. Do this before you post content.
  • Caption your videos. There are lots of ways to do this, I upload videos into Microsoft Stream (available as part of Microsoft 365) and auto captioning/editing feature prior to sharing within my organization.
  • Use Accessibility Checker on any Microsoft 365 document to catch simple gotchas. Add alt-text to all images and ensure the format is screen reader friendly.
  • Microsoft Teams is a one stop shop for conference calls, meetings, collaboration. If you’re looking for the simple answer to ‘is it accessible’ – yes – we’ve worked hard to making this an accessible platform for online meetings. Turn on live captions in any call or webinar, use ‘pin’ feature to keep one speaker (or in my case, my ASL interpreter) on the screen to avoid distractions, use Immersive Reader in the chat window or my favorite feature ‘background blur’ which was specifically designed by one of our deaf engineers to power up lipreading, great example of how an accessibility feature has powered up millions.

Contact us any time

The Microsoft Disability Answer Desk is available 24/7 by phone, chat or ASL Video. Please reach out if you need any advice or assistance as you learn your ‘new language.’

More to come. If you have any feedback or topics you want me to cover in next blog, pop ideas into the comments field below. Stay safe and wash your hands.

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Protecting democracy, especially in a time of crisis

It’s critical when we’re facing crises that we protect our core values, including democracy. Democracies were already facing adversaries intent on using cyberattacks to disrupt our elections and democratic processes. Now, as the world battles the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen, and others have reported, that nation states and cybercriminals are taking advantage of the crisis by using virus-themed phishing attacks and other techniques to attack critical institutions. We must assume they will use these techniques to target our elections as well.

Today, we are announcing several steps our Defending Democracy program is taking to help our democratic processes become more resilient in light of all these threats. First, starting today, we’re expanding our Defending Democracy Program to include a new service, Election Security Advisors, which will give political campaigns and election officials hands-on help securing their systems and recovering from cyberattacks. Second, we are expanding our AccountGuard threat notification service to cover the offices of U.S. election officials and the U.S. Congress as many are working remotely. Third, we are extending Microsoft 365 for Campaigns to state-level campaigns and parties. And, finally, we are publishing our public policy recommendations for securing elections, including ways to secure them while confronting the COVID-19 public health crisis.

Introducing Election Security Advisors

Today, as part of Microsoft’s Defending Democracy Program, we’re announcing a new service called Election Security Advisors, bringing Microsoft’s cybersecurity preparedness and remediation expertise to election officials and political campaigns. Through Election Security Advisors, campaigns and election officials will be able to choose from two offerings from Microsoft’s Detection and Response Team (DART). The first is an assessment of an organization’s systems and then providing expert help in configuring them securely to close any security gaps. The second is an incident response service helping these organizations find the cause of an attack, root it out and provide the direction required to restore their systems.

Microsoft founded the DART team in 2012 to provide proactive and reactive incident response and resiliency services to customers with the most challenging security needs, including investigation and remediation following attacks. The team currently includes a variety of cybersecurity experts including forensic investigators, reverse engineers and crisis experts across more than 33 cities on five continents who are able to rapidly deploy to customers around the world. These experts have been on the cyber front lines, addressing hundreds of incidents in 52 countries, spanning 26 industries and numerous government agencies. We published a case study of the team’s work today here.

Election Security Advisors is available today to all campaigns for federal office in the United States, state and local election officials, and private vendors serving the campaign and election community. These services have been packaged especially for the needs of the campaign and election community and will be priced significantly lower than comparable services for enterprises. We are also examining ways to bring these services to other democracies in the future. Those eligible for Election Security Advisors can learn more by emailing Protect2020@microsoft.com.

AccountGuard expansion

Since we announced our AccountGuard threat notification service in August 2018, we’ve expanded it to political campaigns, parties and democracy-focused non-profits in 29 countries around the world. It now protects more than 90,000 accounts. Starting today, AccountGuard is now also available to members of U.S. Congress and their staff as well as state election officials across the country, and sign up is available here. As many of these officials and their staff are engaging in their duties while working remotely, we hope this extra layer of security will help.

AccountGuard is a free service that notifies organizations of cyberattacks, tracking threat activity across email systems run by organizations as well as the personal accounts of its employees who opt-in. It’s open to Office 365 customers and can track threats targeting Microsoft’s consumer email services, including Outlook.com and Hotmail.  More on AccountGuard is available in our August 2018 announcement here. AccountGuard also includes access to cybersecurity training, and we’ve trained more than 1,500 campaign staffers and consultants on cybersecurity to date.

Microsoft 365 for Campaigns expansion

As we’ve continued to engage with those involved in the democratic process, one thing we hear routinely is that enterprise-grade email and filesharing services with world-class security are often too expensive for campaigns or are too difficult to set up and manage. Based on this feedback, last summer, we announced Microsoft 365 for Campaigns, bringing our best and most secure email services to political campaigns at the federal level.

Starting today, we’re bringing Microsoft 365 for Campaigns to anyone running for political office and political committees at the state level in the U.S., including those running for state legislatures and gubernatorial races. Those wishing to sign up can do so here. As campaigns and committees think about working remotely to support upcoming elections, we believe this will give them the world-class productivity, email, file-sharing and conferencing tools to do so in a way that’s affordable, easy to use and secure. Microsoft 365 for Campaigns provides the features of Microsoft 365 Business to these customers at a low price and with setup tools that help enable any campaign staffer to configure it securely for a campaign environment in about five minutes.

Policy recommendations

Today, we also published a set of policy recommendations and suggested actions government can take to secure the election system, including recommendations for conducting secure elections while addressing the need for social distancing to fight COVID-19.

To accommodate the possible need for social distancing leading into the November 2020 U.S. elections, Microsoft’s Defending Democracy Program is urging governments to

  • Look at options like increasing access to absentee voting
  • Enable curbside or portable voting solutions.

To enable absentee voting, states can, for example, waive the requirement that voters submit a reason for requesting an absentee ballot and allow people to request an absentee ballot online. Portable or curbside voting solutions, which exist today mainly to accommodate people with disabilities, should be expanded, which will require new tools like e-pollbooks that can ensure voters are eligible without being tied to a single polling place.

While COVID-19 is a new and unexpected threat to U.S. elections, it is certainly not the only one. Challenges of nation-state interference and concerns about the security of election systems were already at the forefront of many officials’ minds going into this year. To address this, the policy recommendations also lay out five specific suggestions for securing the elections in general:

  • A paper trail should be required for all elections
  • Election results should be confirmed through post-election audits
  • Elections should be end-to-end verifiable, meaning voters and members of the public should be able to confirm the accuracy of results
  • Consistent funding needs to be provided by the federal government, so that state and local officials know when they purchase new technology that they’ll have funds to keep it secure through updates and improvements
  • Everyone impacted by cyber threats, including the election community needs to be part of the discussion about changing what’s considered acceptable behavior in cyberspace by joining multi-stakeholder initiatives like the Paris Peace Call for Trust & Security in Cyberspace

Of course, we don’t have all the answers, but we’re sharing these recommendations based on what we’ve seen as we’ve tried to offer new technologies to the community and based on discussions with other technology providers, election officials and the academic community. We hope others offer their suggestions and contribute to the conversation.

In closing, there’s one important note about today’s AccountGuard and Microsoft 365 for Campaigns news. Due to local regulations, we are currently unable to offer AccountGuard to state election departments or M365 for Campaigns in the following states at this time: Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Oklahoma, Wisconsin and Wyoming. We encourage customers in those states to explore additional offerings here. In many cases, it’s law or regulation – not technical capability – that is preventing us from helping to secure democratic institutions as much as possible. We’ve been pleased that so many government officials around the world have worked collaboratively with us to break down existing barriers, and we’ll continue to work with government officials to find solutions.

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Introducing new voice styles in Azure Cognitive Services

This post was co-authored by @Qinying Liao, @Anny Dow , Yueying Liu, and Peter Pan.  

Neural TTS enables fluid, natural-sounding speech that matches the patterns and intonation of human voices, helping developers bring their solutions to life.

Today, we’re building upon our Neural Text to Speech (Neural TTS) capabilities in Azure Cognitive Services with new voice styles. With the new styles—newscast, customer service, and digital assistant—developers can tailor the voice of their apps and services to fit their brand or unique scenario.

Built on a powerful base model, our neural TTS voices are very natural, reliable, and expressive. Through transfer learning, the neural TTS model can learn different speaking styles from various speakers, enabling nuanced voices.

In addition to our new voice styles optimized for specific scenarios, we are also releasing new emotion styles. These styles allow you to adjust voices to express different emotions to fit the context, like cheerfulness or empathy. Let’s dive in.

Introducing Newscast, Customer Service, and Digital Assistant styles

 

Newscast

With neural TTS voices in the newscast style, your users can enjoy listening to news or articles in a professional tone that reflects what you might hear on TV or radio newscasts.

Hear Aria’s (English – Female) and Xiaoxiao’s (Chinese – Female) voices in the newscast style:

Text

Newscast style

Default

Heavy snow and strong winds hammered parts of the central U.S. on Thursday and began moving into the Great Lakes region, knocking out power to tens of thousands of people and creating hazardous travel conditions a day after pummeling Colorado.

现今，大批企业以数字化转型为战略目标，数字化转型可赋能企业重构竞争环境、满足客户期望、增强服务运营。为了真正实现“ being digital ”, 许多企业将人工智能视作实现数字化转型目标的首选技术工具之一。

Check out the newscast style in the Bing mobile app. When you search news with the voice search feature, you can hear news briefs using Aria’s newscast style voice.

You can also check out Xiaoxiao’s newscast style voice, which has been adopted in WeChat through the Microsoft Listening Docs app. In Microsoft Listening Docs, users can hear Xiaoxiao’s voice read out multiple document types such as Word, PowerPoint, Excel, as well as images. Users can easily generate audio content for online trainings, news podcasts and more, and share with their social circles.

Customer Service

The customer service style features a friendly and engaging tone and is suitable for scenarios involving customer support, such as an individual checking into their flight, making a restaurant reservation, or reporting a claim.

Hear Aria’s and Xiaoxiao’s voices in the customer service style:

Text

Customer Service style 

Default

Alright, it’s going to be right in front of your door, within 30 minutes. Thanks for calling  Pizza Loco! Have a great night!

 

客服：您好，欢迎致电智慧银行，我是您的智能客服晓晓，请问有什么可以帮您？

客户：你好，我想调整信用卡的额度。

客服：嗯，请稍等，我查询一下状态。请问您要调整到多少额度？

客户：帮我调到三万人民币吧。

客服：好的，已经给您变更成功，稍后您会收到短信提醒。

客户：好的，谢谢。

客服：感谢您的来电，祝您生活愉快，再见。

Digital Assistant

Many customers have been using neural TTS voices for their digital assistant solutions. We are introducing two styles in this area: a chat style for more casual, conversational bots, and a more professional style for scenarios such as in-car digital assistants.

The chat style features a conversational tone, simulating casual dialogue.

Hear Aria’s voice in the chat style:

Style

Text

Chat style

Default

Chat

Oh, well that’s quite a change from California to Utah.

The assistant style features a friendly and helpful tone, which is suitable in scenarios such as smart speakers or in-car assistants. Use the digital assistant voice to hear the weather forecast, search for information, navigate directions, set reminders, and more.

Hear Xiaoxiao’s voice in the assistant style:

Text

Assistant style

Default

没听到你说话，请再说一次。

现在听的是：FM88.8，江苏音乐台的节目，滴滴叭叭早上好。

Bringing new emotions to Neural Text to Speech

To enable you to build nuanced voices for your unique scenario, Neural Text to Speech also offers different emotion styles. You can access cheerful and empathetic styles for Aria’s voice, lyrical style for Xiaoxiao’s voice—which sounds heartfelt and is optimized to read prose or poetry, and cheerful style for Francisca’s voice (Brazilian Portuguese).

Hear the new styles below:

Style

Text

Style

Default

Cheerful

Great, I hope she will like it! 

A canadense postou uma música nova no seu perfil oficial do Twitter.

Empathetic

I want to let you know that you’re loved. I know things are hard right now and it’s OK. You don’t have to do this alone

Lyrical

大家晚上好，我是晓晓。在每一个夜晚来临的时候，我都在这里陪你入睡。忙碌的一天又过去了，现在的你是窝在沙发上看着窗外发呆，还是倒了一杯咖啡继续解决白天没有做完的工作呢？时间过得真快呀，在学校里咬着早餐上课，和同学们嬉戏打闹的日子，仿佛就在昨天。但一转眼，我们都穿着西装变成了大人。 

These new voice styles are also available for customized brand voices through our Custom Neural Voice capability, allowing you to build a unique voice that can also benefit from our new scenario and emotion styles. As part of Microsoft’s commitment to designing AI responsibly, we have developed guidelines for customers in using Custom Neural Voice, in alignment with Microsoft’s principles for responsible innovation in AI. Learn more about the process for getting started with Custom Neural Voice here.   

Get Started

Get started with the new neural TTS voice styles available in Azure Cognitive Services. Check out our documentation to learn more.

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Autonomous systems 101: Q&A about building intelligent control systems

The AI for Business and Technology blog is always looking for ways to help our readers understand how their businesses can benefit from the latest in artificial intelligence and technology. Today, we are talking with Microsoft Senior Applied AI Engineer Kingsuk Maitra. Kingsuk has a PhD in electrical engineering and now leads customer success engagements for autonomous systems at Microsoft.

Blog: Let’s start by figuring out what it is we’re talking about. What exactly is an autonomous system?

Kingsuk: Well, the basic idea of automation is to do repetitive tasks without human involvement, using an established pattern that is somewhat predictable. An autonomous system, on the other hand, is way more than automation because the system is also making informed and intuitive decisions with a substantive amount of knowledge and know-how.

If you expose an autonomous system to uncharted territory, it can make a recommendation to inform decision making, whereas strict automation wouldn’t be able to do anything without explicit human intervention. This essentially frees up human resources and ingenuity for making much more informed decisions. And it also gives you a lot more leverage and liberty and latitude when it comes to ensuring quality and preventing human errors.

Blog: How does an autonomous system learn to make these recommendations?

Kingsuk: Well, artificial intelligence at a very basic level allows a machine to learn from existing experience and existing data. Traditional machine learning is predicated on the availability of large quantities of data. But in the real-life scenarios where autonomous systems are critical to day-to-day operations, such as industrial control systems the environment is often uncertain, and data is sparse. It’s noisy, unstructured and messy, and there’s no easy way to collect a lot of data and methodically label it. So what you can do is model the environment where an autonomous system is supposed to make an impact, and then let the autonomous system explore that simulated environment while being supervised by an operator.

That’s the Microsoft approach, which incorporates machine teaching and reinforcement learning. Years of expertise and experience from a seasoned human operator in a particular vertical can be incorporated into the knowledge base through machine teaching, and that is layered on top of the inputs and signals from the low-fidelity simulator. The autonomous system learns by testing out various actions and being rewarded as it takes the correct action, which is reinforcement learning.

Workers in hard hats observe equipment in a factory environment
Intelligent control systems can help machinery and processes adapt to dynamic environments in real time.

Blog: What kinds of industries could use autonomous systems?

Kingsuk: This type of solution is scalable across multiple verticals, be it manufacturing, industrial automation, energy and many others. These verticals all have their own specialized simulators, and each of them has hundreds of years of research and billions of dollars in development that has gone into the discipline to make them very mature disciplines. So Microsoft’s point of view is that we are not offering a black box solution that is going to go in and disrupt everything they have known for all that time. What we are saying is we use AI to augment the human learning that already exists in those spaces, offering this one solution that can scale. We are not replacing anything, just adding to it.

And not only is this a way to find new solutions to existing problems, but it also offers the opportunity to solve problems that were previously thought unsolvable.

Blog: What’s one example of autonomous systems being applied?

One great example of this is new product introduction, or NPI, which is a complex problem. Most of the time, a new product has a long wish list of properties it needs to have, and the way it often works is a kind of educated guesswork. There might be 50 to 200 parameters, and a person uses heuristics and trial and error, working each parameter sequentially, and it takes several months in a best-case scenario.

With machine teaching and autonomous systems, you can optimize all those parameters, work simultaneously and in parallel and the whole process takes just weeks.

Not only does this save time but it reduces waste, which is better for the environment, and it allows the product to get to market quicker, when it is actually in demand. The market can change so quickly that something that was needed months earlier may no longer be needed.

We at Microsoft are also using this technology internally for power and efficiency optimization of our buildings, which will not only save money but will help us move toward our sustainability and carbon neutrality goals.

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2020 release wave 1 brings new apps, over 400 features across Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform

Today marks the official start of the 2020 release wave 1, kicking off the deployment of new applications and hundreds of new capabilities and updates across Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform.

This release lands at an unprecedented time for business and society. We are providing support and resources for organizations on the frontlines of the COVID-19 outbreak and prioritizing the seamless business continuity for our Dynamics 365 and Power Platform customers. Our customer commitment includes allowances for uptake of the 2020 release wave 1, as well as the timely release of innovations and capabilities that can help your business adapt to challenges during and after the COVID-19 crisis.

Watch the Microsoft Business Applications Virtual Launch Event—now available on-demand—for demonstrations of some of the new Dynamics 365 and Power Platform capabilities spanning customer engagement, commerce, and supply chain management. For a complete list of new capabilities, please review the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform 2020 release wave 1 plans.

Seamless B2C and B2B customer journeys across sales, marketing, and service

At the Microsoft Business Applications Virtual Launch Event, we’ll demonstrate updates to Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Microsoft’s customer data platform (CDP), including first and third-party data connections that further enrich customer profiles that can be updated and activated in real-time. Organizations can unlock the value of their data by quickly and accurately predicting customer behavior using out-of-the-box AI templates for churn, customer lifetime value, and next best action recommendations, as well as enable deeper insights with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics. We’ll also share how Chipotle Mexican Grill, one of the most popular chains of fast casual dining, brought in Customer Insights to create a real-time, up-to-the-moment understanding of their customers to drive relevant and intelligent engagement.

B2B organizations can take advantage of new customer engagement capabilities in Dynamics 365 Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, and Field Service to provide customers with unified, consistent, and personalized experiences throughout the entire buyer journey. Sales teams can leverage advanced AI-powered predictive sales forecasting and a new sales acceleration hub for inside sellers. Marketers can enhance campaigns with more personalized and sophisticated email messages, integrated surveys using Microsoft Forms Pro, and aggregated data and segments from Customer Insights. In addition, service centers benefit from centralized scheduling capabilities for dispatchers to schedule technicians and new omnichannel capabilities to reach customers on their preferred channels. We’ll bring these capabilities to life at the Microsoft Business Applications Virtual Launch Event by demonstrating how HP’s sales, marketing, and service teams can coordinate a seamless, integrated customer journey for an upcoming launch of a new printer.

Delivering seamless omnichannel retail experiences

Dynamics 365 Commerce delivers an end to end retail solution that helps organizations deliver personalized, omnichannel experiences through advanced e-commerce capabilities, intelligent product recommendations, and enhanced clienteling. At the Microsoft Business Applications Virtual Launch Event, we’ll show you how Dr. Martens, the iconic British footwear brand, could replace all legacy applications with Dynamics 365 Commerce, Finance, Supply Chain Management, and Microsoft Power BI to gain greater visibility into its end-to-end processes and virtual warehouses, as well as get a single view of customers across retail and e-commerce.

Exceed customer expectations with an intelligent supply chain

We’re updating Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management to deliver predictive insights and intelligence from AI, IoT, and mixed reality to your organization across planning, production, inventory, warehouse, transportation management, and asset management.

We’ve added out-of-the-box IoT capabilities that leverages Azure IoT Hub to connect signals from mission-critical assets with business transaction data. This enables manufacturers to improve uptime, throughput, and quality by proactively managing shop floor and equipment operations with a real-time view of their entire production and stock.

Supply Chain Management now integrates with Dynamics 365 Field Service to help reduce downtime of geographically dispersed mission critical assets by automating field service operations, as well as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Guides to train your workforce faster, more effectively, and in some cases, more safely using mixed reality learning experiences.

Eaton, a multinational power management company, with 97,000 employees serving customers in 175 countries, is leveraging Dynamics 365 mixed reality solutions as part of its ‘Industry 4.0’ transformation. Following pilot evaluations by their IT and business teams, Dynamics 365 Guides and Dynamics 365 Remote Assist are being deployed globally by different business units starting with the Vehicle Group in over a dozen locations for maintenance, digital layout, training, product development, and connecting global teams on knowledge transfer and best practices sharing.

In addition to these highlights for operations, we’re introducing Dynamics 365 Finance Insights, which brings the power of AI into your finance processes, as well as Dynamics 365 Project Operations, a comprehensive solution for service organizations to connect and run every part of the business. Learn more about these two new applications.

Power Platform: New ways to analyze, act, and automate

Power Automate adds robotic process automation (RPA)

Today marks the generally availability of UI flows, the new robotic process automation (RPA) capability in Microsoft Power Automate. Power Automate already helps hundreds of thousands of organizations automate millions of processes every day. With the addition of RPA, Power Automate will help these organizations to also automate their legacy apps and manual processes through UI-based automation. The key Power Automate RPA capabilities that are reaching general availability today include RPA for attended and unattended scenarios, a flexible business model to support any business scenario, and several AI Builder models.

Power Automate now provides a single solution for end-to-end automation that spans on-premises systems and the cloud. This approach addresses three primary areas:

  • Intelligent understanding of data: Structured and unstructured data from paper-based invoices to images can be easily understood and integrated with other critical business applications. AI-driven capabilities like forms processing in AI Builder are now generally available.
  • RPA connects to enterprise applications without APIs: Some applications are too old or expensive to support API connectivity. With UI flows, end users can automate their work in these applications by recording manual tasks such as mouse clicks, keyboard inputs, and data entry, and then automate the replay of these steps to integrate with legacy systems.
  • Connecting to over 300 modern apps and services: It is easy to work with information stored in the cloud or on-premises apps and databases. We offer native connectivity to common apps or a company’s APIs with over 300 connectors out-of-the-box.

Power Apps adds mixed reality experiences

Today, we’re announcing new mixed reality capabilities coming to Microsoft Power Apps. With these new features, Power Apps is one of the first low-code no-code platforms that makes it possible for everyone to build mixed reality applications.

With hundreds of millions of augmented reality capable mobile devices in the hands of business users, every Power Apps maker will be able to leverage the power of mixed reality to extend their apps with the ease of drag-and-drop development. With these new capabilities, makers can start to digitize workflows in physical space in new and innovative ways.

At the Microsoft Business Applications Virtual Launch Event, you will learn how GSK, the global healthcare company, has fully embraced the Microsoft Power Platform. This includes a mobile Power App leveraging the new mixed reality capabilities, AI Builder forms processing, Power Automate RPA, and Microsoft Power Virtual Agents.

Power BI adds new capabilities

Microsoft Power BI is delivering new capabilities focusing on three key areas to help customers drive a data culture:

  • Building on Power BI’s core amazing data exploration experiences, we’ve added the highly requested decomposition tree AI visual, a new Q&A experience, and added a modern ribbon that users are familiar with from Microsoft Office.
  • As we continue to meet the most demanding needs of our enterprise customers, we are adding full application lifecycle management, with the ability for customers to move an app through a deployment pipeline. We have also completely opened Power BI’s semantic models by adding full support for the industry standard XML for Analysis (XMLA) protocol.
  • Finally, to help our customers weave business intelligence deeply into the fabric of the organization, we’ve added support for Microsoft Information Protection and Microsoft Cloud App Security to protect data even when it leaves Power BI, added deep integration with Azure Synapse, and a completely revamped Microsoft Teams integration.

At the Microsoft Business Applications Virtual Launch Event, we will show you the work we’re doing with one of the world’s largest companies, ABB, a leader in robotics, power, heavy electrical equipment, and industrial automation technology worldwide.

Watch the Microsoft Business Applications Virtual Launch Event live stream

Join us this morning to learn more about these and more 2020 release wave 1 updates, see the capabilities in action, and explore how customers are already taking advantage of the new features.

The Microsoft Business Applications Virtual Launch Event is now available on-demand. Be sure to explore detailed release plans for Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform.