Microsoft Build Foretells the Future of TeamsMicrosoft Build Foretells the Future of Teams
AI, mixed reality, and Microsoft Graph have implications for the future of the company's team collaboration platform, Teams.
June 18, 2018
I attended Microsoft Build last month, and bring tales from the future.
For Build, an annual conference for software engineers and Web developers, is where Microsoft promotes its products and the tools, techniques, and directions for its third-party ecosystem that have the greatest likelihood of influencing the future. This is especially relevant in the case of Microsoft Teams, given that Teams, unlike Skype for Business, is first and foremost a collaboration solution platform.
Three focus areas from Build have implications for the future of Teams: artificial intelligence (AI), mixed reality, and Microsoft Graph.
Artificial Intelligence
Microsoft seeks to help every developer become an AI developer, thereby democratizing AI. Beyond technology, Microsoft talked about the need for trusted, responsible AI products and practices. To demonstrate this commitment, Microsoft announced a $25 million AI for Accessibility program designed to leverage the power of AI to expand the capabilities of the more than one billion people around the world with disabilities.
As Microsoft is known to do, it has introduced a plethora of AI and machine learning products (all under the new Azure brand). These Microsoft AI offerings fall into three broad categories: cognitive services, custom AI, and AI tools.
Cognitive Services
Microsoft wants to deliver widely applicable, pre-trained AI services related to vision, speech, knowledge, language, and search. The mechanism to do so is entitled cognitive services. The idea is to provide all developers an easy way to incorporate intelligent algorithms that help applications, bots, and websites see, hear, speak, and understand.
With these "plug and play" AI capabilities, developers will be able to add a slew of cognitive services, including:
Vision -- facial recognition, object identification, optical character recognition, handwriting recognition, emotion recognition
Speech -- speech to text, text to speech, speaker identification, speaker verification, real-time translation
Knowledge -- automated FAQ creation, content personalization
Language -- sentiment analysis, language detection, text translation, contextual spell checking, content moderation, contextual understanding
Search -- text, visual, video, news search
Customizable AI
With custom AI services, organizations can experiment with and train deep learning AI models on proprietary datasets, and then deploy the developed models to the cloud and edge. With AI, Microsoft has adopted an open approach, providing deep support for its own cognitive toolkit, CNTK, as well as TensorFlow, Chainer, and other neural network frameworks.
Developers can customize and extend almost all of the pre-built cognitive service models to include domain specific identification, translation, and understanding.
AI Tools
Microsoft offers a number of AI tools targeted at both the data scientist and the developer:
Visual Studio Tools for AI -- an extension to Visual Studio that allows developers to access multiple deep learning frameworks, Azure Machine Learning Studio, and Azure Batch AI, and then build and deploy applications to the cloud and edge using the developed models
Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (CNTK) -- as mentioned above, allows the creation of deep learning models using your datasets
Azure Machine Learning (AML) Studio -- a Web-based, visual, drag-and-drop tool that lets you build and test predictive models without writing code. As part of the AML Studio bundle, AML Workbench assists with data wrangling, AML Experimentation service helps test and refine models, and AML Model Management service assists with version control and deployment of models locally, to the cloud, or to IoT edge devices
Bot Framework -- a software development kit (SDK) that allows developers to build conversational bots for Teams, Slack, Skype, Facebook Messenger, and more. Additionally, the Azure Bot Service provides an integrated environment to assist with bot development and a serverless bot service that scales with demand
What this means for Teams: Expect Microsoft to infuse AI everywhere within Teams: automatic transcription for meetings (already available), content summaries, meeting attendee identification, sentiment analysis, auto translation (partially available), voice control via Cortana (partially available), automatic action items and reminders, productivity metrics (e.g. MyAnalytics), attendee engagement analysis, meeting health statistics, and greatly improved search. And then expect third parties to leverage the available AI tools to extend the native capabilities of Teams and provide intelligent bots everywhere!
Mixed Reality
Microsoft uses the term "mixed reality" to describe a spectrum from physical reality to digital reality. This spectrum, as shown below, encompasses augmented reality (AR), provided by devices such as the HoloLens, and completely immersive virtual reality (VR), provided by devices such as the HTC Vive or Oculus Rift.
When I lead vision workshops, I often define collaboration as "two or more people working toward a shared goal that would likely be out of their reach as individuals." During a Build demo session, using the new Microsoft Remote Assist application and the HoloLens, I was able to repair machinery I had never seen before without any training -- the most direct and immediate example of collaboration I've ever experienced.
Remote Assist allows an expert in another location to see what you're seeing, point, and annotate directly in your field of view (because you're wearing a HoloLens).
The mixed reality Remote Assist preview application is free from the Microsoft Store as a Teams add-on.
A second application, Microsoft Layout, leverages VR and AR to let users design and then validate designs within a specific physical space, such as placement of a new piece of equipment in a manufacturing environment.
What this means for Teams: Teams is and will continue to be the hub and proving ground for mixed reality collaboration, even with SharePoint spaces, announced after Build, also delivering mixed reality content.
Continue to Page 2: Microsoft Graph and the Future of Teams
Microsoft Graph
It's a strange name. "Graph" conjures images of high school parabolas and equations in the form y=ax2+bx+c. And yet Microsoft Graph, according to the website, is "... the API for Microsoft 365, securely connecting you to Office 365, Windows 10, and Enterprise Mobility + Security."
Simply put, Graph allows you programmatic access to Office 365 functions and data.
Via the Microsoft Graph, you can:
Securely access contact, meeting, email, and document information to determine who, when, how, and what is trending within your organization
Implement processes that automatically react to changes in documents or meetings, for instance converting finalized documents into multiple formats in order to improve accessibility
Automate complex workflows such as for onboarding or exiting employees
What this means for Teams: Microsoft Graph is an evolving super-API that spans and connects all of Office 365 functionality. At present, a limited number of Teams functions are available via Graph; however, if Microsoft is able to deliver on its stated direction, the Graph framework will further solidify Teams as its primary collaboration and workflow development platform.
The Future of Teams
Taken together, the Build announcements position Teams as the key, strategic end-user application and development platform for Microsoft (because Teams is both). New functionality, such as speech to text, real-time language translation, sentiment analysis, linguistic analysis, visual speaker identification, and mixed reality meeting extensions, along with productivity analytics, intelligent automated assistants responding to speech inputs, and proactive efficiency recommendations, will be delivered first to Teams -- and possibly never to the now-deprecated Skype for Business application.
Further, the developer capabilities already enabled, and soon to be enhanced, within Teams will likely foster a robust third-party ecosystem offering industry- and role-specific add-ins and add-ons for Teams that leverage the Azure bot framework, adaptive cards, and public and enterprise-specific Teams application stores. (At this writing, 180 application extensions were available in the public Teams store.)
At Build, Raanah Amjadi, marketing manager for Teams, demonstrated how Microsoft envisions meetings in the near future:
AI powering Cortana speech recognition and understanding
Graph helping determine team membership, availability, room location, and availability, and allowing meeting scheduling
AI powering facial recognition, speech to text transcription, and contextual language understanding
Graph to find relevant content and incorporate into other documents
Mixed reality to share spatial data with other meeting participants using HoloLens
At Build, Microsoft made it clear that Teams is designed to interconnect and enable all of these capabilities. The challenge for larger organizations now becomes understanding if, when, and how they should transition to Teams; while the ultimate destination offers potential reward, the path is littered with pitfalls and obstacles.
My team and I help organizations predict and plan for the future then deliver exceptional results in the present. We'd like to help you succeed with Skype or Teams, or both. If you have specific questions related to Microsoft Build or Microsoft Teams please comment below, send me a tweet @kkieller or message me on LinkedIn. I'm very good at responding.
