Peter Lee, boss of Microsoft Research, gave some hints during an interview about the direction Microsoft wants to take with the successor to Windows 8. For example, there would be an important role for ‘machine learning’ to make Windows so ‘smarter’.
Although Lee did not want to officially confirm the arrival of Windows 9, he reports in an interview with DigitalTrends that the next Windows version will rely heavily on ‘machine learning’. In machine learning, a field within artificial intelligence, data is often analyzed with complex algorithms in order to subsequently establish relationships between items.
According to the boss of Microsoft Research, the software giant wants to make machine learning useful and visible to the end user. For example, Windows 9 could be equipped with software that can serve as a digital assistant. Lee believes that with such software, companies can become more productive and smarter. Speech recognition would play an important role.
Although Lee left open how the implementation of machine learning in Windows 9 should go, Microsoft, for example, already uses such algorithms for its Bing search engine. The software giant is also trying to integrate Bing more and more deeply into its operating systems, such as in the search options of Windows 8.1 and in Windows Phone 8.1 with the speech assistant Cortana.
Lee wanted to say about Cortana that the virtual assistant becomes “a little more humane every day” in his answers because Microsoft continues to tinker with the beta software. Incidentally, there are indications that Microsoft also wants to integrate Cortana in the desktop version of Windows.