HYDERABAD: From experimenting with mixed reality to deep tech applications and experiences to simple, yet hugely impactful apps which can declutter and make our every day lives easy and better, techies at Microsoft are busy attempting to come up with innovative solutions. And techies are doing this tinkering and experimenting out of sheer passion, during their leisure, after office hours, at Garage, an incubator space which encourages innovation and experimentation. Here are two projects on which the techies are working:
SMS Organizer :
We all know how tiresome and irritating it is to manage numerous spam SMS we get every day. SMS is an important part of our life and work and many-a-time we miss important ones amid several promotional and unwanted SMS. To address this problem, a team of techies from Microsoft have come up with SMS Orgainzer. It has already crossed half a million downloads. “The SMS Organizer classifies and interprets the messages based on their category and ensures that only those needed by the user are displayed. The app has been designed keeping in mind the Indian mobile user’s needs in mind.
The user’s inbox is cleaned by categorising messages into important and promotional categories and placed in separate folders. Also users can favourite an SMS for quick access, block spam senders and mark senders as promotional. They can control the level of notifications depending on SMS type,” said Sandhya Guntreddy, explaining how it works. The makers have also taken care to keep it lightweight and built to work completely offline. It does all the classification and interpretation on the mobile without uploading any SMS to the cloud, thus ensuring user’s privacy.
Sponsored Experiences in Mixed Reality Scenarios:
Sponsored experiences in mixed reality scenarios is a project which aims to provide people with mixed reality experiences on 2D screens and devices. This, they believe, improves user experiences across sectors. The team of five techies working on this project are currently trying to increase users and offering monetisation plan for app developers who dream and strive to make their app a hit.
“Mixed reality is a new technology and it will have several life-changing impact in the coming days. Therefore we want to explore it as intensely as possible. Although there are multiple applications, initially we want to use to help app creators who strive hard to reach out to users. Apart from our regular job, working on new tech to solve everyday problems gives use a huge motivation. This is just the beginning and lot more needs to experimented with,” explained Vikram Bodavula, techie with Microsoft speaking to Express during the Garage launch.
While Kaizala is one of the successful apps, which came out of Garage, projects like Hololens Companion (see box), which aims to add human angle to chat bots promises a bright future. Microsoft has seven Garages globally and the eighth one at Hyderabad is certainly set to give the techies a new platform and opportunity to tinker with their ideas.
Other exciting ideas on the cards
Hololens Companion: Chat bots which use AI are influencing our lives. Now imagine the same functionalities coming to an avatar which moves, behaves, talks, and interacts like humans. Microsoft’s HoloLens Companion does exactly that, enabling people to talk with the avatar about almost anything - whether it is about work or life without being judged. The demo of the companion will be showcased via HoloLens and a phone, explains Reena Dayal Yadav, Director, Microsoft Garage - India.
Kaizala App - This app and service is designed for large group communications and work management. Kaizala makes it easy to connect and coordinate work with the entire value chain, including field employees, vendors, partners, and customers wherever they are. It can efficiently assign and track tasks or collect data with individuals or large groups–even if they’re not within your organisation.
HiveOut: A new group messaging app for Office 365 enabled schools and colleges. It offers a new way to manage information, track progress and make decisions.
Connections: It helps you better manage your relationship with your contacts
Email Insights: A lightweight email search which helps users do their emails related tasks faster
— Deepthi Nandan Reddy
deepthinandhan@newindianexpress.com
@DNandan_TNIE