Microsoft's new service turns FAQs into bots
Finding customer service help online can be a pain. Microsoft is aiming to help with that by making it easier to create intelligent bots that can answer common questions.
Stories by Blair Hanley Frank
Dear engineers: Please build friendly robots
Anyone who has read science fiction can tell you that killer robots are a problem. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, better known as the IEEE, wants to do something about it.
Cortana for iOS, Android now features quick access to common actions
Microsoft's Cortana virtual assistant is getting a facelift on iOS and Android aimed at making it more useful for users, and also bringing a bit of brightness to what's currently a rather dour interface.
Microsoft wants to enable cellular PCs, but will carriers bite?
Microsoft is aiming to help users stay connected by supporting the installation of programmable SIM cards in PCs and Windows tablets and letting users purchase cellular data service though the Windows Store.
Google and Slack deepen partnership in the face of Microsoft Teams
Slack and Google have vastly deepened their partnership roughly a month after Microsoft announced its competitor to the popular enterprise chat service.
Microsoft's LinkedIn deal clears the EU, will close in the coming days
Microsoft’s mammoth acquisition of LinkedIn has just cleared the last hurdle in front of it, paving the way for the tech titan to buy the professional social network for $26.2 billion.
Dropbox boosts mobile productivity with offline folder support
Users who need to make sure they can get access to files stored in Dropbox while they're on the go and away from the web have a new feature to help with that. The company announced Tuesday that users of its mobile apps will soon be able to save files locally for use offline.
Here’s how the Windows 10 Creators Update helps enterprises
A few weeks ago, Microsoft unveiled its Windows 10 Creators Update with a focus on the software’s benefits for end users when it launches next year. On Tuesday, the company showed a different side of the next major patch for its new operating system, showing off features that will help IT professionals.
Microsoft's new Zo chatbot dodges politics, doesn't always make sense
Microsoft is taking another shot at giving users a friendly AI-driven bot conversation partner. On Monday, the company released Zo, a chatbot that users can converse with on Kik, the popular messaging platform.
AWS wants to dominate beyond the public cloud with Lambda updates
Two years ago, Amazon Web Services made a splash when it introduced Lambda. Now, the company has gone even further to bring that technology outside of its core data center regions.
AWS tries to protect its customers from DDoS attacks with new service
Amazon Web Services is trying to help protect its customers with a new service aimed at mitigating DDoS impacts. It’s called Shield, and the entry-level tier is enabled by default for all web applications running on AWS, starting on Wednesday.
Amazon will literally truck your data into its cloud
Amazon is aiming to speed up large data transfer jobs with a truck. The Snowmobile is a big, white semi trailer that can hold 100PB of data that will then get driven to an Amazon endpoint and loaded into its public cloud storage.
Amazon accelerates and simplifies its cloud infrastructure offering
Amazon Web Services continued to push its infrastructure offering forward on Wednesday with the launch of upgrades to its existing instance types and new tools for both simplifying and accelerating computation tasks in its public cloud.
Google gets into the low-code enterprise app development biz
Google is the latest enterprise software provider to throw its hat in the ring of low-code app development with a new service called App Maker.
AWS launches FPGA-based cloud instances to accelerate complex applications
Amazon Web Services gave its cloud customers a set of new infrastructure capabilities aimed at making its compute offering faster, simpler and more capable of running complex applications that benefit from hardware acceleration.