Microsoft is adding on AI capabilities to its popular office productivity suite of applications. Word and Excel, will receive extra AI-powered features to enhance their productivity levels.
Insights in Excel will make it easier to sift through large amounts of data. By using machine learning to help identify trends, outliers, and other useful visualisations, Excel can automatically seek out and highlight patterns for the user to review.
Word will get two new features – Acronym and Tap. The former will use machine learning to understand shortened words by going through documents. By doing this, unknown acronyms will be automatically identified by Word and presented to the user as a complete term, rather than having to resort to a Google search.
Tap will search other relevant documents and spreadsheets without leaving the Word application. This global search function will definitely be useful for those who cross-link contents all the time. It will debut in Word Online for Office 365 commercial Insiders in 2018.
Cortana will also get new features to further enhance its capabilities and making interactions feel more natural. Machine learning allows Cortana to understand that a ticket booking should be added to your calendar and will offer users the option to do so. Cortana will also leverage AI to provide summaries for important emails in a compendium.
Microsoft’s AI research and development looks to be trickling down to consumer products. However Microsoft did not say when the full suite of features will be available to consumers – just that they will start seeing it in Office 365 from early next year.
(Source: Windows Central)
