And I’m going to do a product segment, as there were a few I found notable.
The US Army has awarded Microsoft another contract for its advanced mixed reality goggles designed for combat situations. The new version of the headsets, known as the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS), addressed previous issues of nausea and discomfort and received positive feedback from soldiers during testing. The Army plans to spend up to $21.9 billion on the project, with the headsets undergoing further testing in 2025 for combat use.
Azure Update Manager has reached general availability, allowing organizations to manage software updates on Azure virtual machines, VMs on other cloud platforms, and on-premises infrastructure. It offers features such as automatic VM guest patching, hot patching, and customer-defined maintenance schedules. Azure Update Manager no longer has a dependency on Log Analytics agent or Azure Monitor agent and instead uses the Microsoft Azure VM agent and Azure Connected Machine agent.
Amazon unveiled updates for its voice assistant Alexa at its annual fall event. The updates include the ability for Alexa to understand body language, respond to conversational norms, and perform tasks like providing date night ideas or writing a poem. Amazon aims to make Alexa a more modern and useful assistant using generative AI capabilities.
Google’s Bard AI chatbot can now search and summarize information from Gmail, Docs, and Drive. With this new integration, Bard can help users find specific information in their emails and documents, saving them time and effort. Google assures users that their personal data will not be used to train Bard’s model and will not be seen by human reviewers. Bard’s extensions also include integration with Maps, YouTube, and Google Flights, with more to come.
Why do we care?
I included the Bard update because I expect providers to see it in the wild soon, and wanted to provide the heads up. Azure Update Manager is another data point on the movement of management tools into Microsoft’s arsenal. Microsoft is signaling a one-stop solution for cloud and on-premises infrastructure, indicating the tech giant’s move towards consolidating management tools.
I’ve been down on the metaverse broadly, and wanted to highlight a potential direction for the technology. Bulky goggles are a lot less of a problem for the Army, who already use bulky goggles for things like night vision. It’s this utility that intrigues me, because there are use cases… which mostly are augmented reality, not virtual. I’m far less intrigued by ideas like virtual worlds for usefulness than I am for laying real world data over vision.
It was only a matter of time until Amazon got into the generative AI game with Alexa. I wanted to highlight the thread not because I think there’s an immediate opportunity, and instead because I’m anticipating voice as UI will become a thing… sometime. I’ve been wrong on the timeline here a lot. While voice as a UI has been a slow burn, Amazon’s latest updates to Alexa could be the kindling. With generative AI making Alexa more intuitive and conversational, we might be getting closer to the tipping point for voice-controlled interfaces.
