MICROSOFT, the company known for its operating system and apps, yesterday hinted at a new wave of gadgets that will use AI agents designed to complete specific tasks in healthcare and retail rather than traditional apps.
At Microsoft’s annual software developer conference in San Francisco, Microsoft executives revealed Project Solara, a family of prototypes that includes devices around the size of a smart speaker or keycard badge, based on chips from Qualcomm and MediaTek.
The devices have screens and microphones, but instead of running an operating system and apps like a smartphone, Microsoft executives showed them hosting AI agents that talk to cloud-computing systems to carry out specific tasks, such as documenting a medical visit with a nurse.
“It’s a new platform, but perhaps more importantly, it’s a set of new platform rules that don’t, in some sense, hem in what you can imagine,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said during a keynote address.
Microsoft is competing against rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic to sell cloud-based AI tools for coding and other tasks, while also trying to nudge Microsoft customers toward running AI technologies on the fleets of laptop and desktop computers running its Windows operating systems.
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