Microsoft bets big on AI, its India lab brings out bouquet of solutions

As artificial intelligence (AI) takes centrestage in developing new-age digital technologies, Microsoft Research Lab in India has developed a bouquet of cognitive solutions to address specific challenges faced by enterprises as well as individuals. The solutions developed by the company cover a broad spectrum including helping recruiters to gauge the behaviourial profiles of candidates during virtual job interviews and assisting in real time language translation in vernacular languages among others.

The technology giant said over 370 enterprises in India are currently using these cognitive APIs (application programming interface) and the company is working with over 650 partners to bring AI-based solutions for large, medium and small enterprises in the country.

"We have a range of AI-based solutions for enterprises in India. This is spread across vision, speech, language, knowledge and search scenarios.

Apart from these services, data privacy, computing on low resource devices are some of the areas we are currently working on," said Sriram Rajamani, Managing Director of Microsoft Research Lab-India.

According to the company, it has designed a 'Seeing App' meant for visually impaired which can detect Indian currency and narrate the denomination to the user. Similarly, Talview, a partner of Microsoft has developed an app which gauges behavioural profiles of candidates during an interview done from a remote place. Bajaj Allianz General Insurance is currently using this solution to hire talent from multiple cities across the country, the company said.

Similarly, the technology major has recently launched a solution for real time language translation in three Indian languages such as Hindi, Bengali and Tamil. ''With deep neural networks (DNN)-powered language translation, the results are more accurate and sound more natural," the company said.

Microsoft has also developed chat bots to facilitate automation of various processes in collaboration with its partners. “WittyParrot” is one such platforms which is an AI-powered knowledge and process automation platform for sales, support and knowledge workers. The company said, WittyParrot solutions are currently being used by leading IT and ITeS organisations such as Oracle, Couchbase, Collabera and Data Endure.

Meanwhile, its social chat bot- Ruuh is increasingly becoming popular in India with 1.5 million users. "A user can engage with the chat bot on Facebook in the same way one would interact with a friend. The bot is well versed with Bollywood and has good sense of humour. As an AI chat bot, she is learning increasingly from human interactions to respond emotionally and intelligently," said Rajamani.

Microsoft is also integrating its artificial intelligence solutions with its Office 365 suite. Apart from inculcating personalised search and better designs in its PowerPoint designer, the company is also using data analytics in some of its offering. "MyAnalytics helps in setting productivity goals for users by analysing how they are spending time at work, across meetings, email and other activities," he added.