There was a time when the search box was promoted as a universal user interface. That was the mantra and of course the marketing message of the former enterprise search company called Fast Search & Transfer. This company has been acquired by Microsoft in 2008 and there is no need to mention what its development is today.
With the proliferation of smartphones, smart watches and, soon, numerous other connected devices — the so-called “Internet of Things” — the once familiar search box (and mouse and keyboard) will necessarily give way to speech or perhaps a digital assistants such as Cortana as a successor User Interface.
Microsoft is seeking to enable this with its ambitious Project Oxford, a set of APIs and SDKs for developers that enable them to add a range of advanced capabilities to their applications.
These tools include facial recognition APIs, speech-to-text and text-to-speech processing in multiple languages, image recognition to identify objects and images and what the company calls “Language Understanding Intelligent Service” (LUIS). LUIS promises an advanced natural language understanding and “intent detection,” but is invitation only for now.
The longterm result could be that developers of all sorts of devices could build speech and computer vision into their products, delivering the equivalent of Cortana on everything from televisions to assembly line equipment to household automation systems. All such implementations would be customized to specific tasks and backed by cloud-based artificial intelligence.
This will enable developers to create models for your application to better understand intents like “turn on the lights”, or entities such as “start a new jog/walk/hike/bikeride”. Tune your model with in-depth performance visualizations . . .
Use the pre-built, world-class models to recognize entities like places, times, numbers, temperatures, and to also handle common requests like “set an alarm for 8 AM”. Immediately enable personal assistant functionalities by using a selection of Cortana understanding models.
The bottom line is that LUIS essentially enables Bing’s “intelligence engine” and Cortana-like capabilities to extend to any app on any device.
Google is doing something similar by integrating action buttons (i.e., “buy“) and transactional capabilities into search and Google Now.
What could all this mean for the gambling industry?
Imagine playing using a casino app and wanting to switch games, or using a sports betting app and wanting to make a quick bet. You could just say “5 Euros on Messi to score first” or “I want to play blackjack”.
This would be interesting to see and it would quickly catch on. We just have to wait.
