Most of us can only dream of having the perfect personal assistant, one who is always there when needed, anticipating our every request and unobtrusively organizing our lives. Cortana, the new digital personal assistant powered by Bing that comes with Windows Phone 8.1, brings users…
Visiting Eric Horvitz at Microsoft Research headquarters in Redmond, Wash., is a full-service experience. At the building’s first-floor bank of elevators, situated on a busy corridor, a “smart elevator” opens its doors, sensing that you need a ride. When you arrive on the third floor,…
Springtime on the sun-drenched Amalfi Coast. A perfect little café perched high above the sea, the scent of jasmine and lemon blossoms wafting past. You open the menu, hungry for lunch. Oh, wait—you don’t know any Italian. Now what? Not to worry: Just whip out…
Speech-to-speech translation promises to help connect our world Among the futuristic gadgets in the classic TV show Star Trek, none seemed more useful than the universal translator, a handheld gizmo that helped foster understanding among intergalactic civilizations. Well, we needn’t travel beyond the solar system to…
By Janie Chang, Writer, Microsoft Research During Interspeech 2011, the 12th annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association being held in Florence, Italy, from Aug. 28 to 31, researchers from Microsoft Research will present work that dramatically improves the potential of real-time, speaker-independent, automatic speech…
By Rob Knies, Senior Editor, Microsoft Research It always helps to be prepared. Just ask Ivan Tashev. A principal software architect in the Speech group at Microsoft Research Redmond, Tashev played an integral role in developing the audio technology that enabled Kinect for Xbox 360…
By Douglas Gantenbein, Senior Writer, Microsoft News Center Wikipedia has become one of the world’s largest and perhaps most powerful information repositories. But it is heavily English-centric. Making Wikipedia more multilingual inspired a Microsoft Research India team to develop a tool called WikiBhasha, which was…
By Gary Alt, Writer, Microsoft Imagine mining the web to learn a language. No, not the jargon of webspeak, where IMHO means “in my humble opinion” or F2F is “face to face,” but real, spoken languages, such as Spanish, Hindi, or Japanese. That’s the notion…
By Janie Chang, Writer, Microsoft Research In disaster relief, every hour makes a difference, and communication is essential. When aid efforts began after the recent Haiti earthquake, a request came to the Machine Translation team within Microsoft Research’s Natural Language Processing (NLP) group from Microsoft…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research You’re steering with your left hand while your right is punching car-stereo buttons in eager search of that amazing new Lady Gaga song. Your mobile phone rings, and as you adjust your headset—hands-free, naturally—the driver in front of…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research When you look in the mirror, do you see Leona Lewis? Do your shower walls reverberate each morning with “Womanizer”? Are you convinced that you just might be the next Taylor Swift? Let’s face it: We all fantasize…
By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research People all over the world use the Internet every day, to purchase goods or services, to search for information, to find diversions. But is the World Wide Web truly worldwide? It’s difficult to make the case. Estimates claim…
