At its Build developer conference in Seattle today, Microsoft showed off how developers can extend the company’s Graph API to turn just about any device into a productivity assistant.
To illustrate what that means, Senior Product Marketing Manager Laura Jones took to the stage to demonstrate a scenario in which she has a meeting to get to in the morning.
She first asked Cortana to give her a run-down of her schedule for the day, by issuing a voice command to an Invoke smart speaker. Cortana also informed her of an update to her upcoming travel booking, set up an out-of-office message for her vacation and let her boss know she’s taking time off soon.
The assistant also noted that Jones’ car was low on fuel and recommended that she leave early to make it to her meeting without running out of gas.
When Jones hopped into a model of a car on stage, she was able to continue talking to Cortana to learn of a traffic jam up ahead, let her colleagues know with a short call, and even finish a pending task: pull up a list of designers from her LinkedIn network and generate a summary of their profiles.
What we saw on stage was the leveraging of the Device Graph to push notifications between things like a smart speaker and a connected car.
According to Microsoft, the idea for the future of the Graph API is to allow developers to extend the capabilities of any connected device to plug into the company’s services and let users interact with its apps almost natively.
By creating a flexible Graph like this, Microsoft is expanding its bouquet of services for consumers and enterprise users so they can use the company’s products wherever they are – and in the bargain, stay locked into its universe.
Follow all our coverage of Microsoft’s Build conference here.
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