Power BI teams up with Microsoft Teams

Written by Maggie Sparkman as seen on Microsoft Corporation

Have you seen the announcement about Microsoft Teams, the new chat-based workspace in Office 365? Check it out!

Groups in Power BI are built on Office 365 groups, too, so now you can add and interact with Power BI groups in your Microsoft Teams groups.

If you're an admin for a Power BI group, when you create a team in Microsoft Teams, the app suggests that you add Microsoft Teams functionality to your existing group.

In your Microsoft Teams channel, you just tap the + sign, then add Power BI as a tab in your channel.

Microsoft Teams automatically detects all the reports in your Power BI groups and in My Workspace. You can choose which ones to show in the Power BI tab in your channel.

Now your Power BI report is handsomely displayed in your Microsoft Teams channel.

If your team isn't taking advantage of groups in Power BI yet, now is a great time to try them. They're a great way to share your dashboards, reports, and datasets with your coworkers. Read more about groups in Power BI.

Then see how you can leverage your Power BI groups in Microsoft Teams!

Historic milestone: Microsoft researchers achieve human parity in conversational speech recognition

By Athima Chansanchai as written on blogs.microsoft.com

Microsoft has made a major breakthrough in speech recognition, creating a technology that understands a conversation as well as a person does.

In a paper published Monday, a team of researchers and engineers in Microsoft Artificial Intelligence and Research reported a speech recognition system that makes the same or fewer errors than professional transcriptionists.  The researchers reported a word  error rate (WER) of 5.9 percent, down from the 6.3 percent WER the team reported just last month.

The 5.9 percent error rate is about equal to that of people who were asked to transcribe the same conversation, and it’s the lowest ever recorded against the industry standard Switchboard speech recognition task.

Newly updated Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit can help speed advances in deep learning

By Athima Chansanchai as written on blogs.microsoft.com

Microsoft has released an updated version of Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit, a system for deep learning that is used to speed advances in areas such as speech and image recognition and search relevance on CPUs and NVIDIA GPUs.

The toolkit, previously known as CNTK, was initially developed by computer scientists at Microsoft who wanted a tool to do their own research more quickly and effectively. It quickly moved beyond speech and morphed into an offering that customers, including a leading international appliance maker and Microsoft’s flagship product groups, depend on for a wide variety of deep learning tasks.

“We’ve taken it from a research tool to something that works in a production setting,” said Frank Seide, a principal researcher at Microsoft Artificial Intelligence and Research and a key architect of the Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit.

With the latest version of the toolkit, which is available on GitHub, developers can use Python or C++ programming languages in working with the toolkit.  With the new version, researchers also can do a type of artificial intelligence work called reinforcement learning.

Introducing Microsoft Teams—the chat-based workspace in Office 365

By Kirk Koenigsbauer as written on blogs.office.com

Today, Microsoft announced Microsoft Teams: the new chat-based workspace in Office 365 that brings together people, conversations, content, and the tools teams need to achieve more together. Naturally and thoughtfully integrated with familiar Office applications and services—and built entirely on the Office 365 global, security-rich, compliant hyperscale cloud service—Microsoft Teams joins the rich portfolio of Office 365 experiences designed for the unique workstyle of every group.

·         Chat for today’s teams – Communicate in the moment, and keep everyone in the know

·         A hub for team work – Give teams quick access to information they need, right in Office 365

·         A customizable experience – Tailor workspaces to include content and capabilities teams need every day.

·         Security teams can trust – Get the enterprise-level security and compliance features you expect from Office 365.

Why Microsoft Teams?

Today, people work on twice as many teams as they did five years ago. As your customers’ need for collaboration increases, so does their need to find new ways to work together. Microsoft Teams can meet diverse customer needs, with an integrated suite that beats the siloed alternatives in every category. Group email and calendar. Content co-creation. Audio/video meetings. Cross-company connections. And more.

Microsoft Teams further strengthens Office 365 value, opening doors for you to discuss the benefits of an integrated set of collaboration capabilities with current customers and to win new business with prospective customers who need persistent chat. The just-announced Developer Preview gives you early access to the resources you need to build bots, connectors, and rich integrations for Microsoft Teams.

Microsoft Teams availability

On 02 November 2016, Microsoft Teams will be available in preview to Office 365 commercial customers with Business and Enterprise suite plans, in 181 countries and 18 languages. Office 365 Administrators of qualifying plans can turn on Microsoft Teams through their IT Admin Center, and begin their pilots today.

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