Microsoft has been investing in the promise of artificial intelligence for more than 25 years — and this vision is coming to life with new chatbot Zo, Cortana Devices SDK and Skills Kit, and expansion of intelligence tools.

“Across several industry benchmarks, our computer vision algorithms have surpassed others in the industry — even humans,” said Harry Shum, executive vice president of Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Research group, at a small gathering on AI in San Francisco in December. “But what’s more exciting to me is that our vision progress is showing up in our products like HoloLens and with customers like Uber building apps to use these capabilities.”

When Bill Gates created Microsoft Research in 1991, he had a vision that computers would one day see, hear and understand human beings — and this notion attracted some of the best and brightest minds to the company’s labs.

Last year, Microsoft became the first in the industry to reach parity with humans in speech recognition. There’s also been groundbreaking work with Skype Translator — now available in nine languages — an example of accelerating the pipeline from research to product. With Skype Translator, Microsoft has enabled people to understand each other, in real time, while talking to others in all corners of the world. But what about the dream of face-to-face, real-time translation? Using the company’s new intelligent language and speech recognition capability, Microsoft Translator can now simultaneously translate between groups speaking multiple languages in-person, in real-time, connecting people and overcoming barriers.

Microsoft has also built perhaps the world’s biggest knowledge graph. Thanks to work in Bing and Office 365, it’s possible to understand billions of entities — people, places and things. We now have the opportunity to connect this “world knowledge” with peoples’ “work knowledge.”