During Microsoft’s BUILD conference today in San Francisco, CA, Microsoft announced a slew of new features and updates to products. Which is normal for a developer conference. But what we also found out is that Microsoft is doing something similar to what Facebook is doing with Messenger. In fact, this morning from Facebook we heard that their partnership with KLM is going to allow users to check in for flights, and even get their boarding passes from the messenger app. Microsoft is looking to do essentially the same thing with Skype and Cortana.
According to Microsoft, you’ll be able to chat with Cortana and plan trips, add items to your schedule, and much more. It’s really endless what Skype and Cortana can do for you. Microsoft is also bringing this intelligence to real-time video soon. While they didn’t demo what that might mean, the possibilities are endless right now. Additionally, Microsoft announced that while the bots are launching today, developers will be able to start coding some bots as well. Which could get a bit interesting.
Skype, which started out as a way to do voice and video calls to people around the world, is really starting to evolve. A number of people use it for everyday chat, because it’s one of the more popular services that is available everywhere, and is also cross-platform with video calling functionality built-in (for free of course). Skype was bought by Microsoft in 2011, and there hadn’t been much in terms of innovation for Skype, which had been losing money as of late. But this new chat bots feature is going to be pretty interesting, especially if it works as well as Microsoft is saying it will.
Another part of chatting with Cortana is the ability to shop from Skype. So if you need a new pair of shoes, or maybe need to pre-order a new smartphone (like the LG G5), you can just chat with Cortana and it’ll soon be on its way. Now that could definitely get a bit scary, especially if you’re not careful with what you’re buying. But this is definitely the future.