[00:13.55]Microsoft believes in doing a lot of research because the software of today is not adequate for tomorrow.
[00:23.04]It’s come a long way, such as the graphics interface, the application, and the way we deal with linguistics;
[00:31.94]it’s much better than it was a year ago. Building the Internet into the software has come a long way.
[00:39.60]Some of the more ambitious things, like teaching the computer to speak or listen or see,
[00:47.06]still require a lot of software work that’s not yet done, and so we’ve been investing in research,
[00:54.78]and building the number of research locations which will be increasing in the years ahead.
[01:01.47]One advance is teaching the computer to pick up sentences and understand them,
[01:06.91]and not just think of them as a series of characters.
[01:11.86]Here we have an example where the word processor is looking at an English sentence,
[01:17.35]and suggesting that the grammar is not correct, and showing exactly how the grammer might be fixes.
[01:24.83]That kind of thing has proven to be extremely popular,
[01:29.24]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.
[01:40.09]That pursuit of artificial intelligence is the most exciting thing in computer science.
[01:45.99]Although the progress in that has been fairly slow, I’m confident that that will be accelerating quite a bit.
[01:54.24]Another interesting area that I think people aren’t expecting is computer vision.
[01:59.55]The actual digital cameras that allow you to have an image and scan that image are going down in cost;
[02:06.36]and software to recognize users, see what they’re looking at,
[02:11.11]what kind of gestures they’re making,
[02:13.77]that kind of software is coming along quite well.
[02:17.27]In fact I brought a short little film of a demonstration that someone from our vision group did,
[02:22.99]so let’s take a quick look at some of the progress that’s been made.
[02:33.85]〔Demo video〕
[02:34.28]That just gives you a glimpse of one area that is expected to make the personal computer
[02:34.72]really disappear into the environment and connect up in a rich way.
[02:35.12]Tomorrow’s PC will be quite different from what we have today,
[02:35.59]tomorrow’s Internet will be much better than what we have today,
[02:35.98]but it will all evolve out of this technology that we have right now.
[02:36.22]It’s clear that the reason we refer to this as the information age is that the capabilities available in the information age
[02:36.41]will let people reach out and get what they need, whether it’s business, learning, or for entertainment.
[02:36.61]Microsoft feels in a very lucky position to be helping to drive these things,
[02:36.79]and key for us is working with other software companies so that they can build other applications on top of the system.
[02:36.96]Every industry needs a lot of software work there,
[02:37.14]and so I talk about the software industry creating so many great jobs in the years ahead.
[02:37.34]I think you picked a great field to be in, and we look forward to working with you.
[02:37.52]Thank you.
