Checking out Google Duplex - a leap for the evolution of artificial intelligence

by Mikko

May was full of announcements, many of which would be worth a blog post of their own. Most come from the two major events at the start of the month, Microsoft Build and Google IO, but there was also some news at the very end of the month. Here’s our wrap up.

.NET CORE 3 AND SUPPORT FOR WINDOWS DESKTOP APPLICATIONS - RICH LANDER ON .NET BLOG

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2018/05/07/net-core-3-and-support-for-windows-desktop-applications/

One of the most interesting bits of news for the not-so-immediate future was the support for Desktop applications in the upcoming .NET Core 3, planned to be released in 2019. The promise is that UWP, WPF and even Windows Forms developers will be able to benefit from the performance improvements and tooling of .NET Core.

GOOGLE DUPLEX: AN AI SYSTEM FOR ACCOMPLISHING REAL-WORLD TASKS OVER THE PHONE - YANIV LEVIATHAN AND YOSSI MATIAS ON GOOGLE AI BLOG

https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/05/duplex-ai-system-for-natural-conversation.html

In the Google IO keynote, the Google Assistant making a call to a restaurant was no doubt an exciting demonstration. The AI behind the caller had astonishingly (or frighteningly, depending how you look at it) human-like voice and manners, and understood a conversation that many of us would fail to comprehend. The technology behind it - Google Duplex - is expained in detail in this blog post.

SERVERLESS REAL-TIME MESSAGING WITH AZURE FUNCTIONS AND AZURE SIGNALR SERVICE - PHILIPP BAUKNECHT

https://medium.com/@philippbauknecht/serverless-real-time-messaging-with-azure-functions-and-azure-signalr-service-c70e781ff3c3

This article shows how easy it is to set up a serverless application with real-time communication using Azure Functions and SignalR. The client-side application is built on Angular framework, but it can be easily done with Aurelia as well.

ANNOUNCING .NET CORE 2.1 - RICH LANDER ON .NET BLOG

This is another one from the .NET Core announcement - but the release of .NET Core 2.1, ASP.NET Core 2.1 and Entity Framework Core 2.1 was hotly anticipated and received with a lot of excitement. One of the major improvements compared to the previous 2.0 version was performance, with the build time of a large web application dropping from 107 seconds to 10 seconds. Many will also be happy to see it supporting Raspberry Pi 2+.

ANNOUNCING TYPESCRIPT 2.9 - DANIEL ROSENWASSER ON TYPESCRIPT

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/typescript/2018/05/31/announcing-typescript-2-9/

Yet another announcement, but as a daily user of TypeScript I couldn’t leave it out. The latest version brings a lot of interesting compiler features for editor authors to utilise, and also adds better support for some of the more complicated situations like generic template strings. It also mentions some of the plans for TypeScript 3.0.