Windows 10 is the most successful version of the Windows OS, with over 300 million active devices, over 75 billion hours spent on them, and more than 6 billion questions answered by Cortana, the intelligent personal assistant created by Microsoft for its newest operating system.

Speaking after delivering the keynote address at the India chapter of the Build Tour hosted in Pune on Friday, Jeffrey Burtoft, Senior Program Manager (Developer Experience, Microsoft), said: “Cortana continues to be utilised more and more. We started on phone, PC and tablets, and are now moving her to other platforms like the X-Box, later this year.”

‘Build’ is the company’s annual conference, focused on software and web developers using Windows, Windows Phone, Microsoft Azure and other Microsoft technologies.

The Pune event is a follow-up to Build 2016, held in San Francisco earlier this year.

Integration of OS Attended by 600 developers, Microsoft showcased a host of new tools and technologies with the aim of making Windows the most productive platform for all developers, with capabilities for the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) and tools for bringing apps to Windows 10 from any platform.

“Microsoft is looking for opportunities to build interaction across devices and platforms like iOS, Android and Windows, and the company will provide developers with tools, technology and training to help them be more productive,” Narendra Bhandari, GM, Development Experiences and Evangelism, explained. In his keynote address, Burtoft spoke about the new era of conversational intelligence and about creating more customised and user-friendly personal computing for every customer, industry and business.

At the Pune Build Tour, Microsoft showcased the Bot Framework for developers to create machine learning bots and how developers can build and connect intelligent bots to interact with users naturally wherever they are, from text messages to Skype, Slack, Office 365 mail and other services.

Cognitive services Part of the new tools showcased was Cognitive Services – a collection of intelligence APIs that allows systems to see, hear, speak, understand and interpret users’ needs using conversations. With Cognitive Services, developers can add intelligent features like emotion and sentiment detection, vision and speech recognition, knowledge, search, and language understanding – into their applications.

It also discussed developments around its intelligent cloud service – Azure – that helps developers build scalable, intelligent apps.

Towards its ambition of supporting “any developer, any app, any platform” – Microsoft has announced the integration of Xamarin’s core cross-platform technologies into Microsoft’s product line-up at no additional cost.

Developers can now create apps using an end-to-end mobile development solution that combines power and productivity of the Microsoft development platform, with the richness and performance of native apps enabled by Xamarin.

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