Microsoft yesterday set out to open up its cloud platform to developers hoping to build AI applications, revealing a host of machine learning initiatives at its annual Build conference.

Redmond wants its Azure cloud to be the backbone of developers’ AI innovations, with CEO Satya Nadella saying: «The era of the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge is upon us. These advancements create incredible developer opportunity and also come with a responsibility to ensure the technology we build is trusted and benefits all.»

Project Kinect for Azure,is a package of sensors, including its next-generation depth camera, with onboard compute designed to allow local devices to benefit from AI capabilities.

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Speech Devices SDK aims to enable developers to build a variety of voice-enabled scenarios like drive-through ordering systems, in-car or in-home assistants, smart speakers, and other digital assistants.

The tech giant also previewed its Project Brainwave, an architecture for deep neural net processing that Nadella said «will make Azure the fastest cloud for AI». This is now available on Azure and for edge computing, and is fully integrated with Azure Machine Learning with support for Intel FPGA hardware and ResNet50-based neural networks.

The firm is also open sourcing the Azure IoT Edge Runtime, allowing customers to modify, debug and have more transparency and control over edge applications.

Azure IoT Edge also runs Custom Vision technology, a new service that Microsoft says enables devices such as drones and industrial equipment to work without cloud connectivity. This is the first Azure Cognitive Service to support edge deployment, with more coming to Azure IoT Edge over the next several months, according to the vendor.

«With over 30 cognitive APIs we enable scenarios such as text to speech, speech to text, and speech recognition, and our Cognitive Services are the only AI services that let you custom-train these AI capabilities across all your scenarios,» said Nadella.

Also announced was a new SDK for Windows 10 PCs in partnership with drone company DJI. Using Azure cloud, the SDK brings real-time data transfer capabilities to nearly 700 million Windows 10 devices. As part of the commercial partnership, DJI and Microsoft will co-develop tools leveraging Azure IoT Edge and Microsoft’s AI services to make drones available for agriculture, construction, public safety and other verticals.

Nadella also announced the company’s new AI for Accessibility, a $25 million, five-year programme aimed at using AI to help more than one billion people around the world who have disabilities.

The programme consists of grants, technology investments and expertise, and will also incorporate AI for Accessibility innovations into Microsoft Cloud services. Microsoft said that the initiative is similar to its previous AI for Earth scheme.

Intelligent apps

Microsoft also handed developers the ability to introduce more customisation for Microsoft 365 applications, so organisations can tailor them to their needs.

Developers whose businesses use the Microsoft 365 bundle of Office 365, Windows 10 and Enterprise Mobility and Security can now benefit from wider integrations in collaboration app Microsoft Teams, and even publish custom apps on the Teams app store.

There is also deeper SharePoint integration within Microsoft Teams to enable people to pin a SharePoint page directly into channels to promote deeper collaboration. Developers can use modern script-based frameworks like React within their projects to add more pieces that can be organised within SharePoint pages.

The vendor also revealed new Azure Machine Learning and JavaScript custom functions that let developers and organisations create their own additions to the Excel catalogue of formulas.

Citrix’s annual showcase of the latest advancements in workplace digitisation and cloud computing will be the first event of this scale I’m attending as a reporter – hosted this year in Anaheim, California.

The last year has seen the virtualisation and software-as-a-service (SaaS) company undergo a rocky period – with CEO Kirill Tatarinov stepping down from the helm after only 18 months – replaced with former CFO David Henshall in July – as well as announcing plans to issue layoffs and consolidations.

But having recently overseen increases in revenue by 5% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2018, the company will be in a buoyant mood entering next week’s conference. Citrix has had a roller-coaster last 12 months, something I’m hoping to grill its chiefs on over the coming days.

But the company will be very much focussed on the future – with CEO Henshall aiming to outline the company’s vision and strategy in delivering its single driving principle; making apps and data secure, and easy to access anywhere, at any time. Together with fellow execs Tim Minahan and PJ Hough, I expect to hear plenty of digital transformation related announcements, with a particular focus on those companies taking a cloud-first approach, as well as the latest innovations in cloud-based app security.

Speaking of security, it’s almost certainly going to feature heavily on the agenda. After launching Citrix Analytics in April, I’m expecting the conference to put a heavy focus on how machine learning can further help businesses detect anomalous behaviour and potential threats, and how this is integrated with their overall strategy to deliver always-accessible workplace apps.

I’m also expecting a great deal of commentary about Citrix’s general vision, and what cloud computing looks like moving forwards – from outlining the future of digital workspaces, to how user experience can best be configured, to the way Citrix envisions businesses utilising cloud infrastructure to maximise productivity – with a host of successful user cases, and updates on flagship products, to follow.

Beyond this, however, I’m looking at what we can gain from the ‘super sessions’, featuring former Secretary of State Condi Rice, and Moneyball author Michael Lewis. Between them we’re likely to hear about how technology has affected and changed international affairs, as well as how businesses and governments can use technology to affect positive change, including the ways in which politics, technology and finance intersect.

I’ll be live-tweeting and filing reports about the conference’s biggest takeaways over the next few days on both Cloud Pro and our sister site IT Pro.

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Hidden deep inside Google Chrome are a vast number of secret, experimental options, or ‘flags’. These are features that are in the testing phase and might make it into the browser in due course, or might equally be removed at any time. They are to be found on Chrome’s Experiments page which you can access by typing chrome:flags (or about:flags) into the address bar and pressing Enter – this was recently redesigned to make it easier to browse and search.

Be warned that although enabling some of these features may improve your browsing experience, their experimental nature means that could also ruin it, so you should only enable features you fully understand. As Google itself warns: «By enabling these features, you could lose browser data or compromise your security or privacy. Enabled features apply to all users of this browser.»

Once you’ve enabled some flags, you’ll need to relaunch the browser for them to take effect. The option to do so will appear at the bottom of the flags window.

Give Chrome a Material Design makeover

Material Design is a visual language which, in Google’s own words, «synthesises the classic principles of good design with the innovation and possibility of technology and science», to make pages look more modern and text more readable. It is now used throughout Google’s products and services, but not everywhere just yet. The Experiments page hosts a number of Material Design flags, which you can enable to improve the look of the browser. These include: ‘Material Design in the rest of the browser’s native UI’, ‘New style notification’ and ‘Material Design Incognito NTP’ (which applies the look to your private browsing), and are worth applying to make Chrome feel fresher.

As of Chrome 64, Material Design will be applied to the browser’s Bookmark manager by default – turn to page 32 to find out more.

Close Chrome tabs more quickly

If you tend to have a lot of tabs open when you browse, you may have noticed that closing unwanted ones takes a little time. To fix this problem, Chrome offers a handy flag that speeds up tab closing by hiding the unwanted tab immediately, and then closing it in the background. To find this option, type ‘fast’ into the flags search box, and enable the ‘Fast tab/window close’ flag. After restarting, you should notice that tabs no longer hang when you click to close them.

Scroll web pages more smoothly

Scrolling down long pages can sometimes get a bit rough, and sluggish, especially if you have a lot of tabs open in your browser. Google has an experiment that fixes this issue, and it’s called, naturally enough, Smooth Scrolling. Type ‘smooth’ into the flags’ search box and enable the Smooth Scrolling option.

Mute noisy tabs with a single click

Sites that play audio or video without your express permission are among the biggest annoyances on the web. If you open a bunch of sites in tabs, and one of them turns out to be noisy, you can identify it quite quickly thanks to the speaker indicator that appears on the offending tab. Google offers a flag that turns this indicator into a button that can instantly mute that site when clicked. It also adds commands to the tab right-click context menu that will let you quickly mute multiple selected tabs. To enable this flag, type ‘audio’ into the search box and enable ‘Tab audio muting UI control’.

Generate and manage passwords

Chrome has a lot of password-related flags, some of which are definitely worth enabling. ‘Password generation’ leaps into life when Chrome detects that you are creating an account on a website, and generates a secure password for you. ‘Manual password generation’ shows a Generate Password option on the right-click context menu for all password fields, while ‘Manual password saving’ shows the password-manager icon when you type in a password. If you click this icon, Chrome will save the password, without you needing to actually log-in to the site in question.

Reload web pages automatically

If you lose your internet connection when browsing the web, or move from one hotspot to
another, Chrome can automatically reload open tabs once it detects you’re back online. There are actually two similar flags for this. Type offline into the flags search box and you’ll see ‘Offline Auto-Reload Mode’, which auto-reloads pages that failed to load while the browser was offline, and ‘Only Auto-Reload Visible Tabs’ which will auto-reload pages that failed to load even though their tabs were visible.

Flip Chrome’s interface around

An interesting – if not essential – hidden feature is the ability to switch Chrome’s browser interface from left to right to right to left. This will move buttons that usually appear on the right side to the left, and vice versa. So the back and forward buttons and refresh will move to the right of the address bar, and the menu and any extensions will appear on the left. This option could prove useful for left-handed Chrome users, or for anyone who fancies a change. There’s also the option to have your text direction switch to right to left, if you’re so inclined. To try these flags, type ‘direction’ in the search box.

Make mobile web pages easier to read

Reader Mode is a great feature in the mobile version of Chrome for Android. When enabled, it removes adverts and unwanted distractions from the page, making it easier to focus on the text. The ‘Reader Mode triggering’ flag lets you choose when the Reader Mode option appears. In the Experiments page of the Chrome app, search for ‘reader’ and click the drop-down menu next to ‘Reader Mode triggering’. Options include ‘With article structured markup’, ‘Non-mobile- friendly articles’, Always, Never, and ‘All articles’.

Stop background tabs wasting memory

All browsers – not just Chrome – tend to be memory hogs. The more tabs you have open, the more RAM they’ll consume. Chrome has an experimental feature that discards tabs from memory when it detects your system memory is running low, thereby freeing up important resources and preventing the browser, and possibly other software, from crashing. The tabs don’t get closed – they’ll still appear on the browser and will be reloaded when you click them. If your PC doesn’t has a massive amount of memory then this experiment is definitely worth enabling. Type discarding into the flags search box, and enable it there.

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