Microsoft Photos app to be AI-powered
Microsoft’s upcoming Photos app will now have some intelligent image-sorting. With AI image search to spot and classify objects, the images can be scanned to identify and catalog photos. Windows Central reports that the Photos app will filter photos by colors, objects, faces, months they were taken, and other categories.
Microsoft on way to share LinkedIn’s publicly posted data
A federal judge has ordered that Microsoft’s LinkedIn network must allow a third-party company to scrape data publicly posted by LinkedIn users. Microsoft acquired the social networking site, LinkedIn, for $26 billion last year. LinkedIn has more than 400 million members and around 2 million paid subscribers, and its data access is critical for Microsoft, as it is for other companies. The Wall Street Journal reports Journal reports that the ruling is in a lawsuit brought by hiQ Labs, a startup that analyzes LinkedIn data to estimate whether workers are likely to leave their jobs. LinkedIn previously ordered hiQ Labs to stop scraping its data, and the startup fired back with a lawsuit.
Microsoft exits Trump’s digital advisory board
Microsoft president and legal chief Brad Smith has also left the US government’s digital economy advisory board. The move comes in wake of President Trump’s inability to unequivocally condemn racists, actively defending white supremacists and repeatedly attacking anti-fascist protestors.
Microsoft reaches human parity in Conversational Speech Recognition
Last year, Microsoft reported that its transcription system reached the 5.9% word error rate (that was at par with that of human transcribers score). A second group of researchers working on multi-transcriber process, achieved a 5.1% error rate for humans.