Microsoft's inclusive design mission is guiding the company in ensuring its products and services are designed from conception forward with every user of all ability levels in mind. Though the company has made admirable progress in this regard, it is still a work in progress. Microsoft's Seeing AI app helps people with blindness, Project Fizzyo supports children with Cystic Fibrosis, the Emma Watch and Project Emma aids people with Parkinson's Disease and Microsoft's Immersive Reader helps children with Dyslexia. There are millions of people with varying levels of abilities who are either excluded from interacting with the technologies of modern society or whose physical limitations prevent their full participation in everyday tasks. Best VPN providers 2020: Learn about ExpressVPN, NordVPN & more Microsoft has embraced the challenge of creating specific solutions, like the tremor-halting Emma Watch, which targets a particular aspect of a disability. It has also incorporated solutions that level the playing field into its technologies, like gaze control in Windows, which enables people with immobility to navigate the OS. Given this integrated solution for people with para- or quadriplegia, a similar OS level solution that enables Windows or Cortana to understand sign language for the 466 million people with disabling hearing loss, in a world where "speaking to AI is becoming the norm" seems like a natural goal for Microsoft. And given that a developer "modified Alexa" to do just that we know that it's also possible. If Alexa can do it so can Cortana/Windows

Developer Abhishek Singh created a web application that uses a camera to view and understand sign language which is then translated and spoken and heard by Alexa via Amazon's Echo. A typed response is then provided by the system that can be read by the user after Alexa speaks her response. Using machine learning platform Tensorflow, Singh trained an A.I. to understand American Sign Language and used Google's text-to-speech to translate the signs into spoken words. Singh said, "The project was…inspired by observing a trend among companies of pushing voice-based assistants as a way to create instant, seamless interactions." Given Microsoft's A.I. and machine learning investments, its Cognitive Services that recognize human faces, activities, speech and more and the role of the camera in Windows PCs for biometrics Microsoft has the end-to-end resources to create a system that can communicate with users who use sign language. Inclusion is what Microsoft is about