Ten years ago today, Microsoft was quietly testing something called Bing Concierge Botand looking back on it now, I can’t help but laugh at how familiar it sounds. All speech was an artificial intelligence agent that lived inside your conversations, understood natural language, handled tasks and obtained information for you; basically the same. Google just announced today with its new AI information agents.
Once again, Microsoft had the right idea long before the market was ready for it. And as we’ve seen so many times, the company built the future a decade early and then moved on before the world caught up.
Copilot can absolutely do this kind of agent-style work today, and in many ways it’s already ahead of what Google promises. But moments like this remind me that Microsoft’s biggest challenge is not vision, but timing. They invent the product, shelve it, and then watch someone re-advertise it under perfect market conditions. It’s a pattern I’ve observed for years and this anniversary is a perfect example of it.— Daniel Rubino, editor-in-chief
This story was originally published on May 19, 2016by John Callaham.
“At Bing Concierge Bot, our team is creating a highly intelligent productivity agent that communicates with the user through a conversational platform, such as Skype, Messenger, SMS, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc. The agent does what a human assistant would do: runs errands on behalf of the user, automatically completing tasks for the user. Users speak to the agent in natural language, and the agent responds in natural language to collect all the information; once ready, it automatically performs the task for the user by connecting with service providers. By For example, the user might ask ‘make me a reservation at an Italian place tonight’, and the agent will respond with ‘for how many people?’
There’s no telling when we’ll be able to see Bing Concierge Bot reach consumers.
