It’s been a busy week in the tech world, with Google and Microsoft both hosting their biggest conferences of the year in the same week – and Google’s was admittedly more interesting.
While Microsoft’s Build conference has always been less glitzy than Google I/O or Apple’s WWDC, this year’s news seemed particularly sparse for non-developers. Notably, news about Windows was particularly sparse compared to previous years.
That’s a reflection of a new Microsoft, which to paraphrase The Verge’s interview with Satya Nadella, cares less about everything running on Windows than making everything work with Windows. Microsoft’s OS is no longer the monolith of its investments, as AI and the cloud play more prominent roles in the company’s future, and the company embrace multi-platform technologies. This may all be very practical, but it does make for a duller keynote – unless you’re really into Azure.
But then again, it’s just one year and it’s unreasonable to expect every Build to be game-changing. Musings on new Microsoft aside, there are still notable stories coming out of the conference that’ll have a direct impact on Microsoft’s consumers. Here’s what you need to know.
Microsoft and Amazon first promised Cortana and Alexa would be able to work together way back in August. We’d almost forgotten about it, but Microsoft revealed the feature was currently operating in a limited beta and hinted it would arrive more widely soonish.
It’s a little clumsy, considering you need to tell Alexa to Open Cortana and vice-versa, but it’s still a convenient feature for the voice assistants to fill in the gaps in the other’s features. Both companies’ CEOs have expressed interest in voice assistants working more closely, so hopefully this is just the first step towards a future where Alexa, Cortana, Google Assistant, and Siri run through a virtual field holding hands. The verdict is out on whether Bixby gets to join the club.
While Kinect never had much success as a gaming peripheral, it became a surprisingly effective tool for researchers, students, and developers who could take advantage of its depth sensing and motion tracking abilities.
At Build 2018, Microsoft announced Project Kinect, a spiritual successor with no pretense of being a gaming peripheral. It’s much smaller than the original Kinect, though it’s basically just a pack of sensors with a processor and the ability to beam data to Azure. It also happens to be the sensors that will power the next version of Hololens.
Microsoft only just began to roll out its new Timeline feature to desktops, but it’s already looking to make it useful for mobile devices as well.
As a recap, Timeline is a way to see what you were working on at any given moment, making it easy to resume a project or finish a document. You could re-open all those Edge tabs and a particular PowerPoint file to finish up a research presentation, for instance.
The Timeline will be available on the (surprisingly good) Microsoft Launcher for Android users. On iOS, it’ll live within Edge. Unfortunately, it’ll only really be useful if you use Microsoft’s apps like Edge and Office on your Phone – apps have to communicate with the Microsoft Graph – but you can bet the company will be trying to encourage third parties to support Timeline as well.