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How autonomous systems use AI that learns from the world around it

Millions of engineers across industries such as automotive, aerospace, industrial machinery and medical devices have already built models of the systems they work on using MATLAB or Simulink. This new partnership allows users to bring simulation models built using MATLAB and Simulink to Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform, enabling unprecedented scalability and making it easier for developers and engineers building autonomous systems.

“Our core interest really comes down to engineering productivity — the ability to succeed at a task in the least amount of time possible,” said Loren Dean, MathWorks senior director of engineering for MATLAB products.  “This partnership allows engineers to stay in a familiar workflow to learn and apply AI without having to do the things that are non-traditional for them, like setting up the infrastructure to run a bunch of simulations at once. They’re shielded from all that.”

By running hundreds or thousands of simulations in parallel in Azure and learning from massive amounts of data at once, deep reinforcement learning algorithms can find optimal solutions to chaotic, real-world control problems that other types of AI still struggle to solve.

It turns out these problems are everywhere, said Gurdeep Pall, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for Business AI. Microsoft received three times more interest than it expected after opening its autonomous systems limited preview program in May.

The companies who have applied to work with Microsoft’s autonomous systems team and partners are looking to develop control systems to intelligently stitch fabric, optimize chemical engineering processes, manufacture durable consumer goods and even process food. The potential goes far beyond robotics or autonomous vehicles, Microsoft says.

“These are the kinds of diverse use cases for autonomous systems that we’re starting to see emerge,” Pall said.  “As customers learn about the capabilities of our toolchain, we’re seeing them apply it in really interesting ways because these control problems exist almost everywhere you look.”

Most customer use cases Microsoft has seen so far involve helping existing employees do their jobs more efficiently, safely or with higher quality, said Mark Hammond, Microsoft general manager for Business AI and the former CEO of the startup Bonsai, which Microsoft acquired last year. As sensors in modern workplaces collect ever more data, it can become difficult for any one operator — such as someone who is guiding a drill bit or calibrating expensive equipment — to track it all. AI tools can process that data and bring the most relevant patterns to that operator’s attention, enabling them to make more informed decisions.

“The journey from automated to autonomous systems is a spectrum of solutions, and very few of the engagements we’re seeing are in that fully autonomous with no humans in the loop zone,” Hammond said. “The vast majority are assistive technologies that work with people.”

Training AI systems in virtual worlds

Traditionally, AI models have often relied on labor-intensive labeled data for training, which works well for many problems but not for those that lack real-world data. Now, Microsoft and partners like MathWorks are expanding the use of AI into more areas such as those that require learning from the three-dimensional physical world around them — through the power of reinforcement learning and simulation.

Engineers have long used simulations to mathematically model the systems they work with in the real world. This allows them to estimate how a particular change in a chemical, manufacturing or industrial process may affect performance, without having to worry about slowing production or putting people or equipment at risk.

Now, those same simulations can be used to train reinforcement learning algorithms to find optimal solutions, Dean said.

“The AI is really augmenting how these traditional systems have worked — it just gives you greater confidence in your design and gives you additional capabilities that either had to be done manually before or were difficult to solve,” Dean said.

Imagine a building engineer whose job is to calibrate all the heating and cooling systems in a large commercial building to keep each room at a comfortable temperature as people stream in and out for meetings and outside weather fluctuates — while using as little energy as possible. That could involve tuning dozens of different parameters and might take many cycles of modeling and measuring changes for that engineer to find the best balance of controls.

With the new Microsoft and MathWorks partnership, that engineering expert could use machine teaching tools to help an AI system focus on the most important dimensions of the problem, set safety limits and figure out how to reward success as the algorithms learn. This allows for greater transparency and trust in how the AI system is making decisions and also helps it work more efficiently than randomly exploring all possibilities.

The engineer could train the AI using models that he or she already developed in MATLAB or Simulink. The simulations can be automatically scaled up in the Azure cloud — which means the engineer doesn’t have to worry about learning how to host and manage computing clusters.

The end result is the building engineer uses AI to zero in on promising solutions much faster — but still uses his or her judgment to decide what works best.

“This partnership really marries the best of MathWorks’ capabilities for modeling and simulation with the best of Microsoft’s capabilities for cloud computing and AI,” Microsoft’s Hammond said.

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Microsoft’s new approach to hybrid: Azure services when and where customers need them

As business computing needs have grown more complex and sophisticated, many enterprises have discovered they need multiple systems to meet various requirements – a mix of technology environments in multiple locations, known as hybrid IT or hybrid cloud.

Technology vendors have responded with an array of services and platforms – public clouds, private clouds and the growing “edge” computing model – but there hasn’t necessarily been a cohesive strategy to get them to work together.

“We got here in an ad hoc fashion,” said Erik Vogel, global vice president for customer experience for HPE GreenLake at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “Customers didn’t have a strategic model to work from.”

Instead, he said, various business owners in the same company may have bought different software as a service (SaaS) applications, or developers may have independently started leveraging Amazon Web Services, Azure or Google Cloud Platform to develop a set of applications.

At its Ignite conference this week in Orlando, Florida, Microsoft announced its solution to such cloud sprawl. The company has launched a preview of Azure Arc, which offers Azure services and management to customers on other clouds or infrastructure, including those offered by Amazon and Google.

John “JG” Chirapurath, general manager for Azure data, blockchain and artificial intelligence at Microsoft, said the new service is both an acknowledgement of, and a response to, the reality that many companies face today. They are running various parts of their businesses on different cloud platforms, and they also have a lot of data stored on their own new or legacy systems.

In all those cases, he said, these customers are telling Microsoft they could use the benefits of Azure cloud innovation whether or not their data is stored in the cloud, and they could benefit from having the same Azure capabilities – including security safeguards – available to them across their entire portfolio.

“We are offering our customers the ability to take their services, untethered from Azure, and run them inside their own datacenter or in another cloud,” Chirapurath said.

Microsoft says Azure Arc builds on years of work the company has done to serve hybrid cloud needs. For example, Azure Resource Manager, released in 2014, was created with the vision that it would manage resources outside of Azure, including in companies’ internal servers and on other clouds.

That flexibility can help customers operate their services on a mix of clouds more efficiently, without purchasing new hardware or switching among cloud providers. Companies can use a public cloud to obtain computing power and data storage from an outside vendor, but they can also house critical applications and sensitive data on their own premises in a private cloud or server.

Then there’s edge computing, which stores data where the user is, in between the company and the public cloud – for example, on their customers’ mobile devices or on sensors in smart buildings like hospitals and factories.

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That’s compelling for companies that need to run AI models on systems that aren’t reliably connected to the cloud, or to make computations more quickly than if they had to send large amounts of data to and from the cloud. But it also must work with companies’ cloud-based, internet-connected systems.

“A customer at the edge doesn’t want to use different app models for different environments,” said Mark Russinovich, Azure chief technology officer. “They need apps that span cloud and edge, leveraging the same code and same management constructs.”

Streamlining and standardizing a customer’s IT structure gives developers more time to build applications that produce value for the business instead of managing multiple operating models. And enabling Azure to integrate administrative and compliance needs across the enterprise – automating system updates and security enhancements – brings additional savings in time and money.

“You begin to free up people to go work on other projects, which means faster development time, faster time to market,” said HPE’s Vogel. HPE is working with Microsoft on offerings that will complement Azure Arc.

Arpan Shah, general manager of Azure infrastructure, said Azure Arc allows companies to use Azure’s governance tools for their virtual machines, Kubernetes clusters and data across different locations, helping ensure companywide compliance on things like regulations, security, spending policies and auditing tools.

Azure Arc is underpinned in part by Microsoft’s commitment to technologies that customers are using today, including virtual machines, containers and Kubernetes, an open source system for organizing and managing containers. That makes clusters of applications easily portable across a hybrid IT environment – to the cloud, the edge or an internal server.

“It’s easy for a customer to put that container anywhere,” Chirapurath said. “Today, you can keep it here. Tomorrow, you can move it somewhere else.”

Microsoft says these latest Azure updates reflect an ongoing effort to better understand the complex needs of customers trying to manage their Linux and Windows servers, Kubernetes clusters and data across environments.

“This is just the latest wave of this sort of innovation,” Chirapurath said. “We’re really thinking much more expansively about customer needs and meeting them according to how they’d like to run their applications and services.”

Top image: Erik Vogel, global vice president for customer experience for HPE GreenLake at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, with a prototype of memory-driven computing. HPE is working with Microsoft on offerings that will complement Azure Arc. Photo by John Brecher for Microsoft.

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How Microsoft re-envisioned the data warehouse with Azure Synapse Analytics

About four years ago, the Microsoft Azure team began to notice a big problem troubling many of its customers. A mass migration to the cloud was in full swing, as enterprises signed up by the thousands to reap the benefits of flexible, large–scale computing and data storage. But the next iteration of that tech revolution, in which companies would use their growing stores of data to get more tangible business benefits, had stalled.

Technology providers, including Microsoft, have built a variety of systems to collect, retrieve and analyze enormous troves of information that would uncover market trends and insights, paving the way toward a new era of improved customer service, innovation and efficiency.

But those systems were built independently by different engineering teams and sold as individual products and services. They weren’t designed to connect with one another, and customers would have to learn how to operate them separately, wasting time, money and precious IT talent.

“Instead of trying to add more features to each of our services, we decided to take a step back and figure out how to bring their core capabilities together to make it easy for customers to collect and analyze all of their increasingly diverse data, to break down data silos and work together more collaboratively,” said Raghu Ramakrishnan, Microsoft’s chief technology officer for data.

At its Ignite conference this week in Orlando, Florida, Microsoft announced the end result of a years–long effort to address the problem: Azure Synapse Analytics, a new service that merges the capabilities of Azure SQL Data Warehouse with new enhancements such as on-demand query as a service.

Microsoft said this new offering will help customers put their data to work much more quickly, productively and securely by pulling together insights from all data sources, data warehouses and big data analytics systems. And, the company said, with deeper integration between Power BI and Azure Machine Learning, Azure Synapse Analytics can reduce the time required to process and share that data, speeding up the insights that businesses can glean.

What’s more, it will allow many more businesses to take advantage of game-changing technologies like data analytics and artificial intelligence, which are helping scientists to better predict the weather, search engines to better understand people’s intent and workers to more easily handle mundane tasks.

This newest effort to break down data silos also builds on other Microsoft projects, such as the Open Data Initiative and Azure Data Share, which allows you to share data from multiple sources and even other organizations.

Microsoft said Azure Synapse Analytics is also designed to support the increasingly popular DevOps strategy, in which development and operations staff collaborate more closely to create and implement services that work better throughout their lifecycles.

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A learning process

Azure Synapse Analytics is the result of a lot of work, and a little trial and error.

At first, Ramakrishnan said, the team developed high–level guidelines showing customers how to glue the systems together themselves. But they quickly realized that was too much to ask.

“That required a lot of expertise in the nitty gritty of our platforms,” Ramakrishnan said. “Customers made it overwhelmingly clear that we needed to do better.”

So, the company went back to the drawing board and spent an additional two years revamping the heart of its data business, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, which lets customers build, test, deploy and manage applications and services in the cloud.

A breakthrough came when the company realized that customers need to analyze all their data in a single service, without having to copy terabytes of information across various systems to use different analytic capabilities – as has traditionally been the case with data warehouses and data lakes.

With the new offering, customers can use their data analytics engine of choice, such as Apache Spark or SQL, on all their data. That’s true whether it’s structured data, such as rows of numbers on spreadsheets, or unstructured data, such as a collection of social media posts.

This project was risky. It involved deep technical surgery: completely rewriting the guts of the SQL query processing engine to optimize it for the cloud and make it capable of instantly handling big bursts of work as well as very large and diverse datasets.

It also required unprecedented integration among several teams within Microsoft, some of whom would have to make hard choices. Established plans had to be scrapped. Resources earmarked for new features would be redirected to help make the entire system work better.

“In the beginning, the conversations were often heated. But as we got into the flow of it, they became easier. We began to come together,” Ramakrishnan said.

Microsoft also had to make sure that the product would work for any company, regardless of employees’ technical expertise.

“Most companies can’t afford to hire teams of 20 people to drive data projects and wire together multiple systems. There aren’t even enough skilled people out there to do all that work,” said Daniel Yu, director of product marketing for Azure Data and Artificial Intelligence.

Making it easy for customers

Customers can bring together various sources of data into a single feed with Azure Synapse Analytics Studio, a console – or single pane of glass – that will allow a business professional with minimal technical expertise to locate and collect data from multiple sources like sales, supply chain, finance and product development. They can then choose how and where to store that data, and they can use it to create reports through Microsoft’s popular Power BI analytics service.

In a matter of hours, Azure Synapse will deliver useful business insights that used to take days or even weeks and months, said Rohan Kumar, corporate vice president for Azure Data.

“Let’s say an executive wants a detailed report on sales performance in the eastern U.S. over the last six months,” Kumar said. “Today, a data engineer has to do a lot of work to find where that data is stored and write a lot of brittle code to tie various services together. They might even have to bring in a systems integrator partner. With Azure Synapse, there’s no code required. It’s a much more intuitive experience.”

The complexity of the technical problems Azure Synapse addressed would be hard to overstate. Microsoft had to meld multiple independent components into one coherent form factor, while giving a wide range of people – from data scientists to line of business owners – their preferred tools for accessing and using data.

“With Azure Synapse, there’s no code required. It’s a much more intuitive experience.”

~ Rohan Kumar, corporate vice president for Azure Data

That includes products like SQL Server, the open source programming interface Apache Spark, Azure Data Factory and Azure Data Studio, as well as notebook interfaces preferred by many data professionals to clean and model data.

“Getting all those capabilities to come together fluidly, making it run faster, simpler, eliminating overlapping processes – there was some scary good stuff getting done,” Ramakrishnan said.

The result is a data analytics system that will be as easy to use as a modern mobile phone. Just as the smartphone replaced several devices by making all of their core capabilities intuitively accessible in a single device, the Azure Synapse “smartphone for data” now allows a data engineer to build an entire end-to-end data pipeline in one place. It also enables data scientists and analysts to look at the underlying data in ways that are natural to them.

And just as the phone has driven waves of collaboration and business innovation, Azure Synapse will free up individuals and companies to introduce new products and services as quickly as they can dream them up, Microsoft said.

“If we can help different people view data through a lens that is natural to them, while it’s also visible to others in ways natural to them, then we will transform the way companies work,” Ramakrishnan said. “That’s how we should measure our success.”

Top photo: Rohan Kumar, corporate vice president for Azure Data, says Azure Synapse will deliver useful business insights that used to take days or even weeks and months. Photo by Scott Eklund/Red Box Pictures.

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Project Silica proof of concept stores Warner Bros. ‘Superman’ movie on quartz glass

Turning digital data into physical artifacts

With a nearly 100-year history in film and television, Warner Bros. owns one of the world’s deepest and most significant entertainment libraries. Re-releasing older films in new formats or for new audiences is an important part of the business. It’s also a tremendous cultural responsibility to preserve some of the world’s most beloved stories in perpetuity, Colf said.

“Imagine if a title like the ‘Wizard of Oz’ or a show like ‘Friends’ wasn’t available for generation after generation to enjoy and see and understand,” she said. “We think that’s unimaginable, and that’s why we take the job of preserving and archiving our content extremely seriously.”

The company has redundancy plans in place to handle multiple worst-case scenarios: an earthquake or hurricane that strikes one of the coasts, a fire where the suppression systems don’t kick in or a climate control failure that allows moisture to build up and ruin film stock.

The goal is to have three archival copies of each asset stored in different locations around the world: two separate digitized copies, along with the original physical copy on whatever medium a film or television episode or animated cartoon was created.

Fortunately, original film negatives will last for centuries if stored in the right conditions. But for some older television shows — think episodes of “Alice” shot in the 1970s — the original physical copy has a limited shelf life that requires migration to newer formats. And for today’s films and television shows that are shot digitally, the archival-quality third copy has a very short migration cycle of three to five years, which is challenging to manage.

“Let’s say a TV show is pushing directly into our digital archives; there’s nothing physical,” said Steven Anastasi, Warner Bros. vice president for global media archives and preservation services. “The digital file is going in but I don’t have something I can put in a vault or in a salt mine or anything physical coming into the building.”

Researcher Youssef Assaf drops a square of silica glass in a kettle of boiling water to demonstrate its durability
Microsoft Project Silica researcher Youssef Assaf drops a square of silica glass in a kettle of boiling water to demonstrate its durability. The team has baked, boiled, microwaved, demagnetized and scoured similar pieces of glass with steel wool — with no loss to the data stored inside. Photo by Jonathan Banks for Microsoft.

Warner Bros. is potentially looking at Project Silica to create a permanent physical asset to store important digital content and provide durable backup copies. Right now, for theatrical releases that are shot digitally, the company creates an archival third copy by converting it back to analog film. It splits the final footage into three color components —cyan, magenta and yellow — and transfers each onto black-and-white film negatives that won’t fade like color film.

Those negatives are put into a cold storage archive. In these highly managed vaults, temperature and humidity are tightly controlled, and air sniffers look for signs of chemical decomposition that could signal problems. If they need the film back, they must reverse those complicated steps.

That process is expensive, and there are only a handful of film labs left in the world that can do it. And the process is not optimal from a qualitative point of view, said Brad Collar, Warner Bros. senior vice president of global archives and media engineering.

“When we shoot something digitally — with zeros and ones representing the pixels on the screen ­— and print that to an analog medium called film, you destroy the original pixel values. And, sure, it looks pretty good, but it’s not reversible,” Collar said.

“If we can take the digital representation of those pixels and put it on a medium like silica and read it back off exactly as it was when it came out of the camera, we’ve done our preservation job to the very best of our ability. That’s what I love about this,” he said.

It’s not economical to create archival film negatives for every digitally shot television episode in the Warner Bros. library. The company hopes Project Silica might prove to be a cheaper, higher quality alternative to create physical archives of digital content.

There’s much more work ahead to reach that scale — Microsoft researchers would need to significantly increase the speed at which data can be written and read, as well as its density. Warner Bros. envisions its own infrastructure to read data from the glass archives. But both partners see promise in how far they’ve come.

“If Project Silica’s storage solution proves to be as cost-effective and as scalable as it could be — and we all recognize it’s still early days — this is something we’d love to see adopted by other studios and our peers and other industries,” Colf said.

“If it works for us, we firmly believe that this will be a benefit to anyone who wants to preserve and archive content,” she said.

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First wave of Xbox Black Friday deals arrives

The holidays will be here before you know it, and to kick off the start of November, we are unveiling the first wave of Xbox Black Friday discounts. This is just a sample of our entire Black Friday deals – tune in via Mixer for a special episode of Inside Xbox live from X019 in London on Thursday, November 14 at 12:00 p.m. PT for the full lineup of Xbox Black Friday discounts and offers. You won’t want to miss out!

First up, we are offering a 50% discount on Sea of Thieves: Anniversary Edition, the fastest-selling first-party new IP of this generation. Join this multiplayer, shared-world adventure game featuring new modes like the story driven Tall Tales or The Arena, a competitive multiplayer experience on the high seas. Xbox Live Gold is required to play Sea of Thieves: Anniversary Edition and is sold separately.

Fans can also save up to $20 on select Xbox Wireless Controllers, including some of the newest controllers in the Xbox collection. Snag the Night Ops Camo Special Edition, Sport Blue Special Edition, Gears 5 Kait Diaz Limited Edition controllers and many more at the lowest prices of the season.

Deals are valid starting on November 24 and run through December 2, 2019. Plus, Black Friday kicks off even earlier for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and Xbox Live Gold members, with Early Access beginning on November 21.

Visit Xbox.com, Microsoft Store and participating retailers globally for more details on availability and pricing as deals will vary between regions and retailers. See here for more Black Friday deals from Microsoft Store.

Xbox has something for everyone on your gift this list year, and at every price point. Be sure to tune in to Inside Xbox at X019 on Thursday, November 14 at 12:00 p.m. PT for the full lineup of Xbox Black Friday deals.

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Microsoft Store unveils over 20 top Black Friday offers

With many people eager to get a jumpstart on the holidays, we’re excited to provide a sneak peek of some of the best Microsoft Store Black Friday deals*. According to the National Retail Federation, four in 10 people have already started their holiday shopping this year and Microsoft Store is here to help. Whether you’re an early bird shopper, a deal planner, or a last-minute buyer, Microsoft Store will have great deals for you all season long with expert advice to help you find the perfect gift.

This holiday season, we are offering our best guarantee ever, so no need to wait until Black Friday to start your shopping. With our new Give Wonder Guarantee, you are promised our best price of the season.** If something you purchase at Microsoft Store is offered at a better price later in the season, you can receive savings back for the difference. With free 2-3-day shipping, free extended holiday returns through Jan. 31, 2020, and buy online, pick up in stores options, we’re making it easier than ever to shop at Microsoft Store.

Most Microsoft Store Black Friday deals start on Thursday, Nov. 28 at midnight at microsoft.com and your local Microsoft Store, unless otherwise noted. See our Microsoft Store Black Friday Deals page for full details. Some local Microsoft Store locations will be open on Thanksgiving Day. See full holiday operating days and hours here.

Save hundreds on the hottest Surface deals of the season, including the new Surface Pro 7 and the new Surface Laptop 3

The widely acclaimed new Surface Pro 7 and Surface Laptop 3 devices are in high demand. The Microsoft Store is the best place to buy and experience the full Surface lineup and our expert associates are here to help you find the best device. This holiday, you can enjoy some incredible deals on Surface, including;

    • Surface Pro 7, powered by the latest 10th Generation Intel Core processors, remains the most versatile 2:1 device you can buy with a 12.3” touchscreen with tablet-to-laptop versatility. Starting on Nov. 22, you can enjoy our most popular Surface, for $799 including Type Cover, for the i5/8GB/128GB option (original price $1,029). Or, get more storage and save up to $330 on Surface Pro 7 + Type Cover with i5/8GB/256GB (original price $1,329) as of Nov. 24. Additional Surface Pro 7 offers are available, including the i3/4GB/128GB option, starting at $599 on Nov. 28.

Surface Pro 7

  • Surface Laptop 3 is slim and stylish. You can choose between 13.5” or new 15” touchscreen and save $300 across all new colors and finishes, starting at $999 starting on Nov. 22 for the 13.5” and Nov. 24 for the 15”.
  • Surface Go starting at $299, with savings up to $150. Our best deal ever on Surface Go, the smallest, lightest Surface with 10” touchscreen, perfect for students or those on the go. This great offer starts on Nov. 28.
  • Up to $500 off select Surface Book 2, our most powerful 13.5” or 15” touchscreen laptop. This deal starts on Nov. 28.

Microsoft Store will also offer the hotly anticipated Surface Pro X, beginning Nov. 7. The new Surface Earbuds, offering premium sound, fit and screen-free control, will be coming to Microsoft Stores later this year. A wide range of Surface accessories are also available.

Windows 10 PCs starting at $299

Surface family

Microsoft Store offers the most diverse lineup of PCs with features and prices for everyone. This holiday, we will offer incredible deals on a range of PCs and accessories, including HP Inc. laptops, featuring 10th Generation Intel chips, starting with the HP 15 Laptop (i3) $299. Need more speed and power? The HP 15 Laptop (i5) will be on sale for $399, and HP 15 Laptop (i7) for $499. Or, check out the Dell XPS 15, a 15.6” laptop with a stunning 4K UHD touchscreen and powerful NVIDIA GeForce GTX graphics, which will be on sale at $300 off for $1699. These great PC deals start on Nov. 28.

HP 15 Laptop

Save up to $400 off Gaming PCs powered by Windows 10

Gamers love the high-end performance and graphics they can enjoy on Windows 10 PCs. Save up to $400 on select great Gaming PCs powered by Windows 10, including the Lenovo Legion Y540 15 (i7), Asus ROG Strix G GL531GT (i7) and Acer Predator Triton 500 (i7). These laptops offer rich capability like the Lenovo Legion, which offers simple, built-in Mixer streaming for low-latency, interactive moments for viewers and streamers to engage with other gamers, plus the latest in gaming technology from Intel and NVIDIA. With Xbox Play Anywhere, you can buy a game once and play it on both your Xbox One and any of these Windows 10 PCs. All these deals start on Nov. 28.

Lenovo Legion Y540

Gamers, stay tuned for the unveiling of incredible Black Friday deals during a special episode of Inside Xbox live from X019, our annual global celebration of all things Xbox on Thursday, Nov. 14.  At the hotly anticipated event filled with news, first looks and surprises, we will unveil an extensive set of deals across games, consoles and subscriptions.  This will be our biggest Black Friday sale ever, and you won’t want to miss out!

In the meantime, we are unveiling the first wave of Xbox Black Friday discounts now.  Head to Xbox Wire to learn about how you can save $20 on select Xbox One controllers starting on Nov. 24 and up to 50% off Sea of Thieves: Anniversary Edition starting on Nov. 21.

If Black Friday can’t come soon enough, today you can take advantage of other great deals like the Xbox One S 1TB Console – Gears 5 Bundle for $299. Or, take advantage of an incredible deal today and save $100 and get a free select digital game when you buy an Xbox One X console, or get a free digital game when you purchase select Xbox One S consoles.

Save big on the Samsung Galaxy Note10 phones

Microsoft Store is offering incredible deals on Samsung Galaxy Note10 phones this holiday season. Starting Nov. 21, you can save up to $200 on the Samsung Galaxy Note10 and S10 phones and receive free Samsung Galaxy Buds (a $129.99 value). At your local Microsoft Store, you can save up to $400 and receive up to $650 trade-in credit towards the purchase of your device when you finance your phone with 24 month/0% financing.

Samsung Galaxy Note10

This is just a glimpse of some of our amazing deals – we look forward to sharing more great deals throughout the entire holiday season. You can also check out some great suggestions with our Holiday Gift Guide and we invite you to attend a range of activities and festive celebrations all season long at your local Microsoft Store. However you celebrate this holiday season, we invite you to give wonder with Microsoft Store.

To make sure you don’t miss a deal, customers in the United States can text DEALS to 52426 to get a link to our best Black Friday offers or follow @MicrosoftStore on Instagram and Microsoft Store on Facebook.

* Black Friday offers shown are available online and in Microsoft Stores while supplies last. U.S. prices are shown. Offers and content varies by market and may change at any time. Not valid on prior purchases. May not be combinable with other offers. Other exclusions may apply.

** Offer valid from 12 a.m. PT Nov. 1, 2019 to 11:59 p.m. PT Jan. 3, 2020 (“Offer Period”) on qualifying purchases of select physical goods made at Microsoft retail and online stores in the United States (including Puerto Rico) and Canada during the Offer Period. Excludes certified refurbished devices, Surface for Business devices, and all digital services and products. Offer not valid on purchases made at third-party retailers. Customer eligible for price adjustment only if 1) Customer purchases eligible item during the Offer Period, (2) the price of the item is reduced during the Offer Period, and 3) Customer requests a price adjustment while the item’s price is currently reduced and in-stock for purchase. For purchases made at a physical store and online, Customer can go to any physical store and present receipt to get a qualifying price adjustment.  For purchases made online, Customer must contact Microsoft Store Sales and Support at 1-877-696-7786 with order number and any other information requested by the Store Sales representative. Refunds will be provided to Customer in same manner as item was purchased (credit card use will be credited to original card). Maximum of one price adjustment per item will be granted during Offer Period. Bulk buys of more than two of the same device, per customer’s Microsoft Account, will not qualify for price adjustments. Price adjustments do not include taxes, or shipping or other fees. Void where prohibited or restricted by law. Microsoft reserves the right to modify or discontinue offers at any time. Other exclusions and limitations may apply.

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L’Oréal has a beautiful vision for its digital future

More than a century ago, a 28-year-old French chemist named Eugène Schueller founded L’Oréal with a secret ability to understand the needs of the market and anticipate the expectations of customers.

“A company is not walls and machines,” Schueller once said, “it’s people, people, people.”

 L’Oréal has followed that mandate ever since. Now, the beauty company is relying on Microsoft Teams to help fortify its people-first philosophy. In January, L’Oréal launched Teams, a cloud-based workspace in Microsoft 365 that enables people to share conversations and content.

“Everything is mobile and compatible, and it recreates this essential human interaction,” says Barbara Lavernos, chief technology and operations officer at L’Oréal. “This human interaction (on Teams) is creating intelligence, creating ideas, creating innovation.”

To date, more than 80% of the company’s 86,000 employees have adopted Teams, underscoring L’Oréal’s emergence as a world leader in “beauty tech,” Lavernos says.

By fusing beauty and technology, L’Oréal is pioneering a new business sub-sector, applying data insights and AI tools to its websites, points of sales and applications to personalize its interactions with customers, the company says.

“At the same time, being a beauty tech also is allowing our employees to work, interact and contribute completely differently,” Lavernos says.

An open laptop displays conversations in Microsoft Teams as hands hold perfume bottles nearby.
Microsoft Teams on a laptop screen at L’Oreal headquarters in Paris.

L’Oréal began piloting Teams in late 2018, shortly before launching it companywide.

The platform began to dissolve some of organizational barriers and layers that naturally exist inside a global enterprise and that potentially clog the work, says Satyen Pradhan, a L’Oréal IT employee experience manager based in Hong Kong.

L’Oréal’s merchandising, legal and human resources departments were early adopters, he says.

“The whole idea of introducing Teams in L’Oréal is about people not working in silos,” Pradhan says. “This has resulted in people working together. There’s more collaboration and working with fun. The GIFs and the memes available in Teams all help to lighten up the work environment.”

Teams cultivates collaboration among geographically distant workers, including group chat, online meetings and video calling – tools that also help streamline the effort needed to complete certain tasks, Pradhan says.

“The objective of using Teams,” Pradhan says, “is to reduce your time, as in your work time.

Across the company’s 43 international brands – including Garnier, Lancôme and others – employees use Teams to talk through key business operations, such as manufacturing some 7 billion finished goods each year. Examples of L’Oréal finished goods are a bottle of shampoo or a jar of skin lotion.

With parts of its workforce dispersed from New York to Paris to Shanghai, L’Oréal’s leaders say Teams helps mesh the people who oversee its wide array of brands.

“My team is spread out across the world,” says Serge Christ, vice president of global operations for L’Oréal’s luxury division. “Connecting those teams is also at the heart of the challenge we have to face.”

Brands ranging from cosmetics to perfumes to fashion must be managed the same way – developed, manufactured, marketed and sold in similar styles by L’Oréal colleagues who often work at distant locations and at opposite ends of the clock, Christ says.

“My team is set up with the right innovative solutions to provide new services and new products to the consumer,” Christ says. “In this environment, agility and collaboration are the keys.”

Learn more about L’Oréal’s use of Microsoft Teams to enhance collaboration and innovation in beauty tech by reading this case study. 

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Minecraft now more autism friendly with accessibility features

Anyone who has joined an online game knows chat can be a fun, engaging, and useful tool in teaming up, but it can also be an intimidating, cumbersome mechanism to utilize when there are many things on screen vying for your attention. Sometimes you want to turn chat off, mute certain players, or it may be too difficult to read what others are typing in a busy game. The simple concept of making in-game chat more customizable can dramatically improve your game experience. That’s exactly what a Microsoft Garage intern team set out to do for their winter 2018 Garage internship project in Vancouver: they built features to make Minecraft accessible to more audiences, like the autism community.

“We focused on features that would help people with autism especially, but anybody who plays the game in the future would also benefit.” Michaela Olsakova was a Software Engineer intern during her Garage internship. Stemming from the initial project pitch by the project sponsors, the Minecraft Education team, the philosophy of inclusive design was at the core of the project idea. “Even though we designed for one customer profile, there are multiple other customers who would find value.”

The interns handed their project off to their sponsors on the Minecraft Education team last year and the features were added to Minecraft: Education Edition. Now the team is ready to release the project’s chat-features to the Bedrock version of Minecraft as a suite of chat settings allowing players to customize font, line spacing, font size, and chat colors for all chat and player mentions. These new additions complement existing accessibility features like speech-to-text chat, making Minecraft an even more collaborative and socially connective environment with over 112 million players per month across all versions of the platform.

Garage Vancouver interns from the Minecraft Autism chat features project
Arnaud Paré-Vogt, Henry Li, Joy Zhang, Michaela Olsakova, Rose Hirigoyen, Riad Gahlouz, Charmaine Lee

“At the beginning of our internship, we attended a conference on inclusive design, it was always at the center of everything we did.” Riad Gahlouz was a Software Engineer intern. He explained how the idea of accessibility for the autism community resonated deeply with him. “I have a few family friends that are on the autism spectrum. I’ve always been inclined to help them achieve stuff, things that may seem simple for others but can be difficult for them.” That, coupled with a childhood dream to work on Minecraft, sealed the deal for Riad when it came time for the Garage intern team to give their input about which projects to work on. “When I saw the pitch from the Minecraft Education sponsors, I thought this is the perfect match. I got Arnaud interested in the project and then everyone else kind of followed.”

Arnaud Pare-Vogt was a Software Engineer intern on the project. He shared a simple but important message that guided their approach to accessibility. “Having accessibility features doesn’t have to impact the difficulty of the game.” While working on the project, Arnaud and team encountered the misconception that making games more accessible meant making them easier. The interns demonstrated that simply was not true and that these features are independent from what makes a game difficult. “Designing a game for inclusivity and accessibility doesn’t mean you have to make it easy.”

Rose Hirigoyen was a Software Engineer and quality co-champion along with Riad on the project. “This project taught us to really learn about the customer first – in our case it was meeting and talking with people of varying abilities, understanding how it feels for them when they’re gaming, what challenges they face, and what we can do to help not just in Minecraft but in general, to have a deeper understanding of their experience.”

Rose explained how sensory overload, when a person might experience sounds, visual signals, or colors that can be extremely overwhelming, can dramatically affect their ability to play. “Usually the chat was one big, white wall of text. When you see that, it can be hard to read, hard to make out the different people that are speaking. We wanted to give options like making the text bigger, and adding spacing and color, so when you’re playing with friends it will be easier to communicate with them.” Not only text, but colors, objects, shapes, and patterns are all potential culprits.

As part of making Minecraft more accessible and enjoyable, people like Melissa Boone, a Research Manager at Xbox, explores how to design better game experiences. Melissa was one of three social and behavioral scientists who provided customer research guidance to the interns. She has been closely involved with the Minecraft team for several years, watching people playing games and talking with players to uncover what they love as well as what can be improved.

“Minecraft is one of those teams that’s super progressive and inclusive, with one of the most diverse game audiences out there. We want to continue that tradition.”

“Everyone was excited for the opportunity to bring more accessibility into the game.” Melissa guided the interns on how to conduct user research studies, including how to recruit people for the study, having the right kind of audience to participate, determining what questions to ask, and how to have productive conversations. “Because there is a large existing community of Minecraft players with autism, it made a lot of sense to focus the project efforts there and meet the players where they are.” User research was a key component that informed what features should be built. “It was pretty cool to have the opportunity to teach the interns the research process so they could conduct actual studies themselves, analyze the results and uncover insights. It’s a skill they can use in other contexts no matter what they’re working on.”

Stéphane Morichere-Matte is Principal Program Manager for The Garage and runs the Vancouver Garage Internship. Over the years, a customer-focused approach remains an important pillar for each project, and as a result, he has cultivated relationships with diverse groups and communities all over Canada. “Our interns were very fortunate to be hosted by the Pacific Family Autism Network, where we got to work with the community to find out how to make games more inclusive. The game enhancements are not very difficult to do, but it can make such a positive impact.”

Communication can be difficult for people on the autism spectrum, which is why the interns decided to focus on developing chat features. “While visiting the Pacific Family Autism Network, we witnessed a lot of people who bonded over these games,” Program Manager intern Charmaine Lee explained. “People are making meaningful connections through gaming, so it’s very rewarding when they have a game experience that fits their needs.”

Another thriving Minecraft community of players of all ages is found on Autcraft, a whitelisted Minecraft Java Edition server. Teachers also have been using Minecraft to support special education classes and engage students in custom lesson plans with Minecraft: Education Edition.

Minecraft accessible chat features settings menu

Henry Li, the Designer intern on the project, recounted how it was his first internship experience and one that he won’t soon forget. “I worked with these really talented interns, my peers, on one of the biggest IP’s in the world. It was an honor to work on such a hugely impactful project.” The practice of embracing new ideas and continually learning was something he acquired along the journey. “A lot of the growth mindset I absorbed from everyone around me. Each day you get to learn something new and there’s plenty of things to do. In those four months I learned so much. Once you have a growth mindset, your life will be different.” The interns pushed each other’s limits and accelerated productivity, helping each other grow, learn from failure, and celebrate the moments of success. “Even though the pressure you have is from your peers – everyone has dependencies and ownership of the project, we get to decide what to do and what to work on – it’s having that great teamwork that helps foster growth.”

Echoing this sentiment was Michaela. “Somehow we all got really lucky and had the most amazing team to work on this. You succeed together and fail together. I think that’s rare. I’ll never forget it.”

Each day, gaming is becoming more accessible to people from all walks of life. The Xbox Adaptive Controller, games like Ear Hockey, and game-dev tools like Responsive Spatial Audio for Immersive Gaming, are only a few of the ways Microsoft is practicing thoughtful, human-centric design for technology that connects people. The interns can now add Minecraft accessible chat-features to the expanding list, with high hopes that everyone can benefit from easier to read, customizable chat, tailored by you, to enhance your Minecraft experience.

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Surface reveals new holiday lineup and introduces a new category of dual-screen devices built for mobile productivity

A collection of Microsoft devices on display

Pre-release product shown, screens simulated and subject to change.

Today in New York we announced our broadest Surface lineup ever – with five new products coming this holiday and two new dual-screen devices, Surface Neo and Surface Duo, coming in Holiday 2020.

When we started Surface, we had a vision to remove the conflict between the tablet and laptop. What started as an effort to create the two-in-one evolved into a full line of products that are more versatile, more adaptable and more personal. We know that to be your best, you need devices that adapt to you to help you accomplish your goals. These new products are about empowering you to be your most productive, and your most creative.

With that in mind we are bringing more performance and new designs to our most popular product lines with the new Surface Laptop 3, Surface Pro 7 and Surface Pro X, all available for pre-order today1 in select markets. Surface Laptop 3 delivers style and speed, now with a choice of a 13.5” or 15” display and new colors and finishes. Surface Pro remains the most versatile 2:1 device you can buy – whether you choose the new and improved Surface Pro 7 or the always-connected Surface Pro X, a bold new take on our iconic 2:1. Designed for comfort and rich sound with intuitive touch controls, Surface Earbuds are the perfect complement to your Surface.

We also shared our vision to bring the productivity of Surface to even smaller and more mobile form factors with Surface Neo and Surface Duo, our new dual-screen devices. We’ve seen how the versatility of the 2:1 has pushed the PC category forward, and we’re excited about what dual-screen devices will do for mobile computing next year.

Surface Laptop 3

The new Surface Laptop 3 balances power and elegance, making it the perfect everyday laptop. Now available in two sizes, Surface Laptop 3 is twice as fast with the same slim design and all-day battery life.2 Updated with the 10th Generation Intel® Core™ processor, Surface Laptop 3 13.5” comes in new eye-catching colors, including Sandstone and Cobalt. Choose the warmth of the tone-on-tone Alcantara® or the sleek, new machined aluminum all-metal finish.  We also introduced Surface Laptop 3 15”, adding a larger screen and industry-leading integrated graphics performance with the new AMD Ryzen Surface Edition processor. It’s the fastest 15” laptop you can buy.3 Surface Laptop 3 offers a more comfortable typing experience with a full 1.33mm key travel, now with a 20% larger glass trackpad, both USB-A and USB-C and Fast Charging, taking your Surface device to an 80% charge in about an hour. Improved front-facing cameras, OmniSonic speakers and dual far-field Studio Mics deliver crystal clear sound and audio whether you’re on a conference call, listening to music or watching a movie. Surface Laptop 3 13” starts at $999 and Surface Laptop 15” starts at $1199.

Surface Pro 7 and Surface Pro X

Surface Pro remains the most versatile 2:1 device you can buy – whether you choose Surface Pro 7 or the brand new ultra-mobile Surface Pro X. Redesigned from the inside out, Surface Pro 7 is now twice as fast with a 10th Generation Intel® Core™ processor, both USB-A and USB-C and an all-day battery.4 While Surface Pro 7 keeps the iconic design customers love and businesses rely on, we wanted to keep pushing our Pro line forward with Surface Pro X. At 5.33mm and 1.68 pounds, Surface Pro X is the thinnest, lightest, most powerful and most connected Surface Pro ever. The new Microsoft SQ1 processor codesigned with Qualcomm pushes 2 teraflops of graphics processing power, and is the fastest Qualcomm processor ever created for a PC. With 33% thinner bezels, we’ve given you the feel of a vibrant 13” edge-to-edge touch screen in the chassis of a 12” device.5 The new Surface Pro X Signature Keyboard includes pen docking for secure storage and charging for the new Slim Pen, so it’s always ready when you need it. Surface Pro 7 starts at $749 and Surface Pro X starts at $999.

Surface Earbuds and Accessories

Featuring an ultra-comfortable and stable fit, Surface Earbuds offer intuitive touch and voice controls for music, calls and more. Experience rich, immersive Omnisonic sound, and instantly play Spotify from your Android phone with a triple tap on either earbud.6 Screen-free integration with Office 365 lets you access your Outlook calendar and email with your voice7,8 (in the U.S.) and even get live, on-screen captions and translations in PowerPoint. Enjoy all-day battery life with the included wireless charging case.9 Surface Earbuds are priced at $249.

We’re also announcing a range of accessories that will help customize the way you work – from type covers, pens and mice designed to work with our Surface products to a selection of accessories to help you be more productive from any PC. We built on decades of experience delivering workspace comfort with the new Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard and Mouse, introduced the sleek, affordable Bluetooth® Keyboard and compact, colorful Bluetooth® Mouse, and are offering new colors for our popular Arc Mouse.

Surface + Office, built for modern productivity

Today Office announced several new features that take advantage of new capabilities in the Surface lineup to make you more productive. New Office enhancements include transcription in Word for the web, inking capabilities in Excel that leverage the new Surface Slim Pen and ultra-portability of the Surface Pro X, gesture support in PowerPoint for the new Surface Earbuds, and ink and voice comments in Word that take advantage of all of it.

A new era of mobile creativity

With Surface Neo and Surface Duo we are introducing a new category of dual-screen devices designed to help people get more done on smaller, more mobile form factors. Today, people carry PCs, tablets and phones because each device performs a specific task well. Each screen does something we need when we need it.  But these devices are limited with what they can achieve when you must switch between apps on a single screen or switch between screens altogether.  When that switching happens, we break our focus.  We break our flow.

What if we didn’t have to switch between devices, screens or apps?  What if one device had two screens to keep us in flow?  A device that is small enough to easily carry with you, but feels big in terms of productivity. That was the inspiration behind creating a dual-screen device that gives you the benefit of a larger screen or the flexibility of two screens when you want to do multiple things at once. Imagine being able to take a Microsoft Teams call on one screen and look something up on the web or view a document on another.  Or simply being able to watch Netflix while doing email or chat. Switching seamlessly between tasks, without having to switch between devices.

Surface Neo and Surface Duo are optimized for the way we naturally multi-task, helping people get more done on the go.

Surface Neo

Surface Neo is dual-screen device built for productivity on Windows 10X, an expression of Windows 10. A 360-degree full-friction hinge connects two 9” screens, enabling Surface Neo to adapt to whatever posture you need in the moment. When you open it you have a full-size 13” display in the thinnest LCD in its class. It’s built for productivity and multitasking like a true PC would be – running full productivity apps, with a removable keyboard and compatibility with Surface Pen and Bluetooth® mouse.

Surface Duo

Surface Duo is the first Surface to fit in your pocket. Surface Duo brings together the best of Microsoft productivity experiences, Android apps and Surface hardware design into a single device you can take anywhere. And, yes, it makes phone calls. It has two paper-thin 5.6-inch screens that unfold to 8.3 inches, and just like Surface Neo, it can be used in a variety of modes to let you work the way you’d like.

To support Surface Neo, we are introducing Windows 10X, an expression of Windows 10 designed for a new category of dual-screen PCs. With Surface Duo we are building upon Android to marry cutting edge hardware with familiar software and services.  We’re excited to work with developers and the industry to create the next wave of dual-screen computing and unlock a new era of mobile creativity.

Surface is built for business

Surface, combined with Microsoft 365, offers the enhanced productivity and security businesses are after, and the results are clear – more than 75% of Fortune 500 companies have purchased Surface. We’re listening to our customers and continue to design with them in mind. This means improved serviceability for Surface Laptop 3, removable SSDs in Surface Pro X, as well as new, more sustainable commercial packaging that significantly reduces the amount of waste by more than 30% in weight and volume compared to our historical retail packaging. With Windows 10 Pro, Advanced Exchange Service10 at no additional cost, and support for Windows Autopilot – users are instantly up and running securely with over-the-air updates.

Surface is driven by a singular ambition – to build the most productive devices on the planet to help people achieve more. We’ve challenged convention, invented new designs, and created devices that adapt software, services and AI to the way people naturally think and create. To keep you in flow. And we’re not done inventing.

1 Surface Laptop 3, Surface Pro 7 and Surface Pro X are all available for pre-order today in select markets, with additional availability to follow.

2 Up to 11.5 hours of battery life based on typical Surface device usage. Testing conducted by Microsoft in September 2019 using preproduction software and preproduction 13.5” Intel® Core™ i5, 256GB, 8 GB RAM and 15” AMD Ryzen™ 5 3580U Mobile Processor with Radeon™ Vega 9 Graphics Microsoft Surface® Edition devices. Battery life varies significantly with settings, usage and other factors. See surface.com.

3 Class as defined as premium ultrathin 15” that are max 20mm in height and have a TDP of 15W and which run AMD Ryzen processors. Data measured by AMD and Microsoft in September 2019. Tests run on pre-production Software and Hardware.

4 Up to 10.5 hours of battery life based on typical Surface device usage. Testing conducted by Microsoft in September 2019 using preproduction software and preproduction Intel® Core™ i5, 256GB, 8 GB RAM device. Battery life varies significantly with settings, usage and other factors. See surface.com.

5 Based on Microsoft SQ1 Processor design and optimization. Comparison to existing ARM based PCs.

6 Requires a Spotify account. Available only on Android.

7 Requires subscription to Office 365.

8 Cortana available in select markets; experience may vary by region and device.

9 Up to 24 hours of battery life with the included charging case. Eight hours continuous listening on a single charge, plus another two 8-hour charges with the charging case. Battery life varies with usage and settings.

10 Advanced Exchange Service is available at no additional charge with the following Surface for Business products: Surface Pro 7, Surface Pro X, Surface Laptop 3 in 13.5”, Surface Laptop 3 in 15”, Surface Pro 6 and Surface Laptop 2. Advanced Exchange is only available in supported markets. Restrictions apply. See Surface for Business warranty page for AES terms and conditions and list of supported markets.

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Xbox Insiders: Play games from your console on a mobile device with new Xbox Console Streaming preview

Test out our newest Xbox One console feature

Today, we at Team Xbox are excited to talk about Xbox Console Streaming, our new system feature that lets you play your Xbox One games from your console on a mobile device.

If you’re an Xbox Insider in the Alpha and Alpha Skip-Ahead rings in the US and UK, you can now try a preview of Xbox Console Streaming. You’ll be able to play your owned and installed Xbox One games, including Xbox Game Pass titles, on an Android phone or tablet remotely from your home console.

Our vision at Xbox is to empower you to play Xbox games where you want, when you want. Whether you’ve got just a few minutes to complete a race in Forza, or find yourself with an hour to get some online multiplayer in before the next train arrives, console streaming allows you to play your games on the go.

We set out on this vision for game streaming earlier this month by beginning the public preview of Project xCloud, allowing you to play games directly from the cloud. And now we’re delivering on our second streaming option by kicking off the preview of Console Streaming so you can remotely play your full Xbox One library from your own Xbox.

I’ve been spending a lot of time testing Xbox Console Streaming through our internal employee takehome program, spending lunch breaks playing through Slay the Spire. I love being able to game during these moments so I can always stay in touch with my gaming community and make progress through stories that were traditionally tied to my living room. I’m excited for Insiders to experience this for themselves.

This preview is an important step in our journey to deliver game streaming to Xbox players around the world. We’ll work closely with you and the Insider community to gather feedback that will shape and define future iterations of Xbox Console Streaming.

As we learn more from all of you and continue to improve the experience, we’ll open Xbox Console Streaming to more Insider rings and expand to additional regions. Stay tuned for updates.

Xbox Console Streaming (Preview): What you need to know

Here’s what you need to know and can expect from Xbox Console Streaming (Preview):

  • You need to be an Xbox Insider in the US and UK with a console enrolled in the Alpha or Alpha-Skip-Ahead rings to participate in the preview.
    • We will expand the preview to more rings and regions in the future. If you’re interested in joining the Xbox Insider program, you can find more information here.
  • To participate in the Xbox Console Streaming preview, Insiders need:
    • A phone or tablet running Android 6.0 or higher, with Bluetooth 4.0.
    • A Bluetooth-enabled Xbox One Wireless Controller.
    • While not required, we recommend a controller mount for those gamers testing on a phone.
  • Download the Xbox Game Streaming (Preview) app from the Google Play Store:

Xbox Console Streaming

Xbox Console Streaming

  • The app will guide you through setting up Xbox Console Streaming on your enrolled Xbox One, including performing a test to ensure your home network, console and controller are ready for Xbox Console Streaming:

Xbox Console Streaming

Xbox Console Streaming

    • The network test ensures your console’s network connection and setup meet the minimum requirements:
      • NAT type: Open or Moderate
      • Upstream bandwidth: At least 4.75 Mbps required, 9 Mbps preferred
      • Network latency: 125 ms or less required, 60 ms or less preferred
      • Console settings: Power setting must be Instant-on
    • For help with improving your console’s setup, visit the Xbox Support website.
    • For additional Game Streaming help, check out the Game Streaming Support Hub, or ask questions and join the discussion at the Xbox Insider Subreddit.
  • We encourage you to test Xbox Console Streaming with a wide variety of Xbox One games, although original Xbox and Xbox 360 backward-compatible titles are not supported at this time.

We are eager to have you join us in building the best experience for Xbox gamers on all devices. Your input is crucial as we continue to improve, innovate, and expand to bring Xbox Console Streaming to all Xbox gamers. We couldn’t do it without the efforts of our fans and the gaming community.

For more information, please visit https://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-game-streaming/console-streaming

Thank you!