Calling AI “the third run time”, Nadella said, “If the operating system was the first run time, the second run time you could say was the browser, and the third run time can actually be the agent. Because in some sense, the agent knows you, your work context, and knows the work. And that’s how we are building Cortana. We are giving it a really natural language understanding.”

AI has been the buzzword at Microsoft for a while now. And the CEO has gone on record to say that it “is at the intersection of our ambitions.” Cortana is an intelligent assistant (agent) that “can take text input, can take speech input, and that knows you deeply.”

“We should not claim that artificial general intelligence is just around the corner,” he said. “I think we are on the right ladder this time… We are all grounded in where we are. Ultimately, the real challenge is human language understanding that still doesn’t exist. We are not even close to it... We just have to keep taking steps on that ladder.”

Source: Mashable