Build 2016: Windows 10 Anniversary Update paves way for bots and Ubuntu

"Human language is the new AI layer" says Satya Nadella, as he peddles "Conversation as a Service"

Highlights of Microsoft's annual Build developers conference in San Francisco so far include a growing focus on using "bots" to communicate, along with ever-widening attempts to please all the people all the time, punctuated by the announcement of Ubuntu coming natively to Windows 10.

The "Windows Anniversary Update", which is going to hit "this summer" for the 270 million people now apparently using Windows 10, includes relatively unexciting keeping-up-with-the-joneses features such as biometric security for apps and Microsoft Edge (only Edge, if that's not your browser of choice) and a virtual ruler for improving stylus penmanship.

However, a rather more interesting announcement was the facility to run Linux natively on Windows.

"This is native Ubuntu Linux primary running on Windows," explained Kevin Gallo, Microsoft's corporate VP of Windows Developer Platform.

"We've partnered with Canonical to offer this great experience, which you will be able to download directly from the Windows Store."

Promising a pure Linux experience - not ported or recompiled - Gallo may very well have been introducing the opportunity to begin running a potentially unlimited range of Linux applications cleanly on Windows.

Along similar lines, the "Desktop App Convertor" - part of Microsoft's ongoing "Project Centennial" concept, which focuses on bridging software between platforms - was also demoed. This provides the ability to quickly and easily port Win32 applications into "Modern" ones; the demo showed Sage software being swiftly wrapped into a Modern application. A gaming demo followed, showing popular title The Witcher 2 being recompiled as a Modern applicaton. Head of Xbox Phil Spencer was on-hand to promise that features such as downloadable content for games would also be compatible with the Modern interface.

To discuss the practical advantages of porting Win32 to Modern, Computing caught up with VP of Windows and Devices Group Yusuf Mehdi to find out what Microsoft is thinking.

"The original genesis of the concept still holds," Mehdi told Computing, "which was to have a truly secure experience. We think you need these Universal Windows Platform Apps, written in a way to make them well-behaved. Until you have that, you're going to have viruses and bugs and PCs starting to flake out."

So it's purely about security?

"It's about the overall computing experience for the user," replied Mehdi.

"From our perspective that's what we're trying to achieve - so this merger is the best of both worlds."

For the consumer, Mehdi said applications would be "well-behaved, well-architected and not trying to install crazy code", before rhapsodising about the ability to put apps in the Windows Store and feature them as live tiles in Windows, which has "a bunch of advantages" that Microsoft would "keep adding to as we go along".

Next, it was announced that Microsoft is shipping HoloLens development kits to developers and enterprise customers today, the AR device's SDK and emulators immediately appearing on Microsoft's developer pages.

"Conversation as a Service"

After all this, CEO Satya Nadella took the stage again to start preaching what may become a new mantra for Microsoft: the idea of "Conversation as a Service".

Promising a bullet-pointed list of approaches to help machines interface smoothly with humans, which included plans to "augment human abilities and experiences", to be "trustworthy" and to be "inclusive and respectful", Nadella swiftly addressed the elephant in the room. He described the company's failed Tay bot, which became a racist, sexist Holocaust denier less than 24 hours after being activated, as "not up to the mark" and insisted that Microsoft is going "back to the drawing board".

But he went on to outline a new company-wide plan to usher in something new.

"Bots are like new applications you converse with," said Nadella, describing a future where we can expect digital assistants - such as Microsoft's own Cortana - to converse by themselves with bots on behalf of human owners.

Nadella even went on to describe "human language [as] the new AI layer", before revealing plans for Cortana to begin integrating with applications such as Slack and Kik to become "bot-functional" in the Windows environment. A Visual Studio demo of a simple "bot" to order pizzas from Dominos Pizza was shown off to delegates.

Computing quizzed Mehdi again to find out a little more about Microsoft's gameplan for bots, and what it could mean for the enterprise.

"I think it's going to happen rapidly, and we're going to go from the notion of every company needing a website, intranet, extranet or line-of-business app, consumer app ... now they're going to need a bot for both consumers and employees," said Mehdi.

"You can imagine some great scenarios. I could ask, ‘Hey, what are the retail figures for Windows in China?' and it would come back and answer the question for you. Or I could ask ‘Where do I go to get my expense report filled out, and what if I'm travelling to a foreign country?' and you can imagine that instead of having to remember where that app is on the corporate network, you just ask the bot and it tells you."

For customers, said Mehdi, a "very rich scenario" is easy to envisage where "you can take your website and turn it into a bot, effectively".

In terms of working with the likes of Kik and Slack, Mehdi told us Microsoft is currently "working with these companies" to achieve integration at an experimental stage.

Overall, Microsoft presented a solid argument as an opening gambit today, elegantly refreshing well-worn trends such as big data analytics, AI and Internet of Things into some decent multi-platform possibilities bristling with the sort of science-fiction-cum-science-fact promise that always whets coders' appetites.

Day one ended with a demonstration of an internally developed application that allows a pair of specced-up glasses to photograph and describe the surrounding world to its blind wearer ("I think it's a girl throwing an orange Frisbee in the park" etc.). There was no better summary of Microsoft's determination to push its agenda of openness and pioneering spirit into interesting new directions.