Month: June 2017

The original Crackdown was an instant classic on Xbox 360, and now having had a chance to play the latest entry at E3 2017 it’s safe to say Crackdown 3 retains the explosive gunplay, high jumping excitement, and exhilarating superhero aspects from the original and has dialed them up to 11. This time around, the year is 2045, and it’s your job as a member of the Agency, an elite taskforce made up of super Agents to uphold their unique brand of justice, to find those responsible, eliminate them, and restore peace in New Providence, a city oppressed by TerraNova,… Continue reading E3 2017: We Submit Our Explosive Application to the Agency for Crackdown 3→

“That’s why we chose the Microsoft Secure Productive Enterprise, because it allows me to deliver a secure technology experience that drives creativity, collaboration and teamwork for the business.” —Read more on global “Growth Pharma” leader Allergan’s move to Office 365 and the Secure Productive Enterprise to complete its digital transformation.

The post Allergan embraces growth pharma model, accelerates business with the Microsoft Secure Productive Enterprise appeared first on Office Blogs.

Continue reading Allergan embraces growth pharma model, accelerates business with the Microsoft Secure Productive Enterprise→

Call of Duty: WWII is bringing fans back to the trenches of the second world war, giving them a brutal, boots-on-the-ground view of the most important battles of the European theater. As protagonist Private “Red” Daniels of the U.S. 1st Infantry Division, players will fight through iconic encounters such as the Battle of the Bulge and the D-Day invasion of Normandy. During our behind-closed-doors demo of the game’s story-driven campaign, we got a taste of how Sledgehammer Games is bringing these historical skirmishes to scary-real life. In a mission dubbed “Marigny 44”, Daniels and his squad-mates are tasked with taking… Continue reading E3 2017: War is Hell in Call of Duty: WWII’s Boots-on-the-Ground Campaign→

For the next couple months we’re going to revisit Build 2017, each post focusing on different aspects and technologies presented. Not every session will be listed, just a select set, hopefully enough to wet your appetite. All the on-demand sessions can be found and the Channel 9 Build event site.

Bots, bots, bots everywhere… Here’s a select 14 of the Bot sessions at Build.

Build Revisited Table Of Contents

• Pre-Recorded Sessions
• .Net, XAML, Visual Studio
• Azure
• Windows 10
• AI/ML
• Bots (This Post)
• Office
• ALM & DevOps

Distill information into conversational, easy to navigate answers with Microsoft Cognitive…

Microsoft Cognitive Services QnA Maker is an easy-to-use API that trains AI to respond to users’ questions in a more natural, conversational way. QnA Maker is a question and answer service with a graphical user interface—meaning you don’t need to be a developer to train, manage, and use it for a wide range of solutions. 

Contextual decisions for you

Do you want to recommend a news story? Have your interface optimize for its user? Maybe you just wish that when you used machine learning it actually worked in deployment? In all of these cases, you want to make decisions amongst a set of actions based on a context to optimize an outcome. Doing this consistently and effectively requires a system that combines exploration and learning together to adaptively discover performant policies. We have created that system and deployed it several ways with great results. That system can now be used by you, most easily for simple content personalization, but more generally in any system where you have many repeated events where context matters in making a decision and the quality of that decision can be evaluated.

Chat bots on Bing.com

Learn how chat bots enhance the Bing experience and how you can add your custom bots to Bing.

Use Bing and Microsoft Cognitive Services to create unique domain and site search

In this session we discuss how you can use Bing and Cognitive Services to enhance your domain and site-specific solutions to best benefit your enterprise.

What’s new with the Microsoft Bot Framework

Come see how we have made it easier for developers to build more intelligent bots and to reach more channels, across all modalities. See the future of building bots with a preview of next Bot Framework release.

Build intelligence into your business apps with ease using Bing APIs in Microsoft…

The Bing API’s in Cognitive Services let you bring the intelligence and knowledge of the planet to your app in just a few lines of code. Join us to learn about the Bing Search APIs, get a sneak peek at the next version of “Search” APIs, and learn how you can leverage these services in conjunction with the Microsoft Bot Framework to build an intelligent assistant. See useful demos, experience the simplicity of calling this code, and get ideas for adding this functionality to your own applications.

How Microsoft Cognitive Services can help your apps communicate with people

Microsoft Cognitive Services Language APIs – Bing Spell Check, Language Understanding, Linguistic Analysis, Text Analytics, Translator and Web LM – can enable your apps to understand language and communicate with people.

Computer vision made easy: From pre-trained models to Custom Vision, Microsoft Cognitive…

Learn about Computer Vision APIs and tools from Microsoft, and how you can embed them in your software solutions. There will be a deep dive into the new Custom Vision service from Microsoft Cognitive Services, a tool for easily building, deploying, and improving an image classifier. We will also disambiguate how to find the right tool for the job across our APIs, services, Cognitive Toolkit. There will be announcements and demos across image classification, face and emotion recognition, OCR, and video services. See powerful demos, experience the simplicity of calling this code, and get ideas for adding this functionality to your own applications.

Bot Analytics Dashboard

Why we needed to build an OSS dashboard displaying advanced analytics for Microsoft Bot Framework and how we did it.

Bot Human Handoff

Bots can’t replace our human agents, but they can augment the customer service experience. This session explores how we can use a bot to initiate a conversation with a customer, and then hand off context to a human agent.  

Creating FAQ bots with QnA Maker

The best bot is the one that meets the user’s needs, and sometimes that’s just the ability to answer some basic questions. Learn how to quickly create a bot with QnA Maker, a Microsoft Cognitive Service, with just a few lines of code, and enable your knowledge workers to update the knowledge base.

Dialog management in Bot Framework

One of the most important skills every bot developer needs is the ability to work with the dialog stack for a seamless conversation and experience for the user. The Node.JS Bot Framework SDK has powerful tools to enable your bot to transition from one dialog to the next, ensuring the correct dialog is executed for user requests. This session covers several strategies for working with dialogs in complex bots.

Designing conversational UI for bots (and humans)

The Bot Framework enables you to quickly build and publish a bot to engage with users on many of the popular messaging services like Skype, Microsoft Teams, Facebook Messenger, and Slack. But to many designers and developers, designing an “app” UI as a conversation in a messaging windows is a new and daunting prospect. In this session, you’ll learn how to design a conversational UI that feels as fast, as fluid, and as natural as a messaging conversation between friends, while driving user engagement for your bot.

How your applications can benefit from AI using Bing APIs on Microsoft Cognitive Services

Bing APIs on Cognitive Services provides a wealth of AI capabilities for you to use in your enterprise or mobile applications. Learn how easy it is to incorporate knowledge and intelligence into your applications and take your business to the next level.

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Continue reading #MSBuild 2017 Revisited: Bots→

The cool 123Kinect site blogged about this new game, a “game” (it’s not really a game, much more a health app than game) that I thought looked pretty darn cool…

Zazen, A Zen Meditation Game Announced

Independent developer Nangok Software have announced a Zen meditation game for Kinect 2 called Zazen, the trailer for which you can watch above. Zazen will be available to download on Xbox Live from this Wednesday, June 7th, exclusively for Xbox One via the ID@Xbox self-publishing programme…

Zazen currently seems to be only announced for North America, which is odd considering the developer is Japanese and the game appears to be in Japanese with English subtitles, but I will of course check for availability in other countries on its release date and report that in the next Zazen article.

It’s worth noting that, as far as I know, this is the only game other than (the now sadly defunct) Xbox Fitness to use Kinect 2’s heart-rate monitoring capability

…

Click Here For More Info! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bH6nOq0gCHY

Project Information URL: http://123kinect.com/zazen-zen-meditation-game-announced/53392/

Purchase Download URL: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/p/zazen-zen-meditation-game/bz0hb1x89s67

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Continue reading Kinect to Zen Meditation→

On Wednesday, June 14, live from the Xbox booth, Microsoft hosted the third of four episodes of its daily broadcast show from E3, “Xbox Daily: LIVE @ E3.” Julia Hardy and Kate Yeager joined Larry Hryb (Xbox Live’s Major Nelson) and Graeme Boyd (Xbox Live’s AceyBongos) to share some of the biggest news from the show, including a special visit from Head of Xbox, Phil Spencer. With several new reveals, interviews with a variety of developers and creators, and amazing trailers, watch the entirety of this episode above (or jump to the following segments at timestamps listed below). And don’t… Continue reading Watch Wednesday’s Xbox Daily: Live @ E3 Recap→

Did you miss a keynote or session? Visit the Microsoft Excel Community to experience the full lineup of keynotes and sessions on demand, and connect with experts and peers. Learn how to build a data culture at your organization, and chang… Continue reading Microsoft Data Insight Summit 2017→

Communication is key. That’s the biggest thing to know when sitting down to play Sea of Thieves, which we had chance to do today at E3 2017. Our group was comprised of complete strangers as we each sat down to take on the persona of a colorful pirate with compass and sword in hand, and a thirst for adventure. After a brief, friendly introduction, we quickly went about assigning ourselves roles. “Who wants to raise the anchor?” “Anyone want to get the sails ready?” “Which brave soul wants to steer the ship?” I immediately jumped at the chance to take command,… Continue reading E3 2017: Making Friends With Strangers on the Sea of Thieves→