Here is your daily newsletter from TFiR. Enjoy!

1/ Microsoft has released Office 2019 for Windows and Mac. Designed for businesses and consumers, the update is now available as a one-time purchase for volume-licensed commercial customers. Consumer versions should arrive in the next few weeks. For customers who haven’t opted for Microsoft’s Office 365 service with monthly feature updates, Office 2019 provides new features and updates to the on-premises apps. The 2019 release of Office products also includes updates to Microsoft’s servers. The company has plans to release Exchange Server 2019, Skype for Business Server 2019, SharePoint Server 2019, and Project Server 2019 for businesses in the coming weeks.

Source: Microsoft Blog

2/ IBM has rolled out the Watson Decision Platform for Agriculture, along with other Watson solutions and services pre-trained for a variety of industries and professions. These include customer service, human resources, supply chain, manufacturing, building management, automotive, marketing, and advertising.

The Watson Decision Platform for Agriculture platform gathers data from multiple sources – such as weather, IoT enabled tractors and irrigators, satellite imagery, and more. The result is a single, overarching, predictive view of data as it relates to a farm in an easy-to-use app.

For the individual grower, this means support for making more informed decisions to help improve yield. For example, using AI-enabled visual recognition capabilities, growers can identify certain types and severity levels of pest and disease damage and determine where to spray pesticides. Or a grower can forecast water usage, thereby reducing waste and helping to save money.

Source: MarketWatch

3/ Adobe has introduced a new artificial intelligence-fueled virtual assistant called Intelligent Alerts, that aims to help users of Adobe Analytics find deeper insights that could have been missed otherwise. The new AI, as the company puts it, will automatically generate information without being asked by users.

Source: CNBC, TechCrunch

4/ Microsoft launches Cortana Skills Kit for Enterprise at the company’s Ignite conference in Florida. It enables the personal intelligent assistant Cortana to complete company-specific tasks, including correctly filing TPS reports. The development platform is powered by the Azure Bot Service and leverages Language Understanding from Azure Cognitive Services, allowing developers to create company-specific skills for Cortana using known and trusted tools, explained Vivek Goswami, a program manager on Soltero’s team. Additional features include control via Azure Active Directory over when skills are deployed and who can access them.

Source: Microsoft Blog

5/ Google has joined hands with the Central Water Commission of India to alert users in the country about impending floods, using artificial intelligence and computational power. The service is only currently available in the Patna region, with the first alert going out earlier this month. Google’s engineering VP Yossi Matias said in a blog post that the company is using AI and computational power to create better forecasting models that predict when and where floods will occur, and also incorporating that information into Google Public Alerts.

Source: Google Blog