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Microsoft believes in doing a lot of research because the software of today is not adequate for tomorrow.It’s come a long way, such as the graphics interface, the application, and the way we deal with linguistics;it’s much better than it was a year ago. Building the Internet into the software has come a long way.Some of the more ambitious things, like teaching the computer to speak or listen or see,still require a lot of software work that’s not yet done, and so we’ve been investing in research,and building the number ofresearch locations which will be increasing in the years ahead.One advance is teaching the computer to pick up sentences and understand them,and not just think of them as a series of characters.
Here we have an example where the word processor is looking at an English sentence,and suggesting that thegrammar is not correct, and showing exactly how the grammer might be fixes.That kind of thing has proven to be extremely popular,and (it’s just a step on the road to getting computers to actually understand what’s going on) in the same way that humans do.That pursuit of artificial intelligence is the most exciting thing in computer science.Although the progress in that has been fairly slow, I’m confident that that will be accelerating quite a bit.
Another interesting area that I think people aren’t expecting is computer vision The actual digital cameras that allow you to have an image and scan that image are going down in cost;and software to recognize users, see what they’re looking at, what kind of gestures they’re making, that kind of software is coming along quite well. In fact I brought a short little film of a demonstration that someone from our vision group did,so let’s take a quick look at some of the progress that’s been made.
That just gives you a glimpse of one area that is expected to make the personal computer really disappear into the environment and connect up in a rich way. Tomorrow’s PC will be quite different from what we have today, tomorrow’s Internet will be much better than what we have today, but it will all evolve out of this technology that we have right now.
It’s clear that the reason we refer to this as the information age is that the capabilities available in the information age will let people reach out and get what they need, whether it’s business, learning, orfor entertainment. Microsoft feels in a very lucky position to be helping to drive these things, and key for us is working with other software companies so that they can build other applications on top of the system. Every industry needs a lot of software work there, and so I talk about the software industry creatingso many great jobs in the years ahead. I think you picked a great field to be in, and we look forward to working with you.
Thank you.
