Blog archive for 2019

Minecraft now more autism friendly with accessibility features built by Garage Interns
Anyone who has joined an online game knows chat can be a fun, engaging, and useful tool in teaming up, but it can also be an intimidating, cumbersome mechanism to utilize when there are many things on screen vying for your attention. Sometimes you want to turn chat off, mute certain players, or it may be too difficult to read....

New Garage project Digital Marketing Center saves time for SMBs
For small and medium businesses, time is of the essence. Managing a digital marketing presence across social media, search & social advertising, and online listings, can quickly become complex and overwhelming, especially when you have to manage each platform individually. We’re excited to announce an opportunity to try a tool that comes to the rescue: Digital Marketing Center, a Microsoft....

New Garage project Sketch Pal offers advanced, intelligent inking features
It’s that time of year again! And no, we’re not talking about the leaves changing color, pumpkin picking, or deciding on the best pop culture reference to inspire your Halloween costume (The Scoops Ahoy crew from Stranger Things, obviously) for those of us residing in the Pacific Northwest. We’re talking about Inktober, the annual artist community challenge to create a....

New VR Garage project Microgravity Lab takes students to space
Virtual reality can transport us to new lands that are near, far, or imagined. As a team of Garage interns found partnering with the Microsoft Hacking STEM and NASA Stem on Station teams, it can also demonstrate physics concepts and spark an interest in STEM careers. For the back-to-school season, we’re excited to announce the opportunity to try Microgravity Lab,....

Built by Garage Interns, find the best movie, powered by the Microsoft Recommenders collection
Challenged with rethinking how to build a movie recommendation experience, a team of Garage interns based out of Cambridge, MA created a sample app and corresponding documentation that shows how to use recommendation algorithms in an app experience. Today, we’re excited to share their project ahead of its debut at the RecSys’19 conference next week: Recommenders Engine Experience Layout, a....

Adafruit and Microsoft Garage interns team up to create Device Simulator Express
This summer 16 groups of Garage interns tackled interesting engineering challenges ranging from making apps more accessible to VR solutions for cybersecurity. One of them was sponsored by the Python Tools for AI team and electronics paragon Adafruit to and set out to make programming embedded solutions for IoT devices simpler and more available to a broader audience. Device Simulator....

Fan favorite Dictate graduates to Office and Windows
Today, we’re excited to graduate Dictate, a Microsoft Garage project, 2 years after its initial launch. The Office add-in for Microsoft Office released in June 2017, enabling Office users to be more productive with the power of dictation. Upon positive reception from users, Dictate’s approach to dictation was increasingly integrated across Office and Windows products. The feature sets are staffed....

Garage Interns add a summer’s worth of new features to release Web TS 2.0
Following the initial release of Web Template Studio in May earlier this year, Web Template Studio 2.0 is now available with additional services, inspired by community feedback and built by a second team of Garage interns. The VS Code extension helps hackers create full stack web apps quickly, now with a broader range of front and back end service options.....

Outings graduates, bringing new destination search experiences to Bing
The Garage empowers Microsoft employees to explore demand for new products and features through tangible experiments. Outings, a Microsoft Garage project, an app for iOS and Android released in December 2017 and has since generated the feedback, usage, and buzz required to confirm the sponsoring Bing team hypotheses that travel and destination search is an area for continued investment. The team has....

New Garage project Smart Tagger makes finding and tagging documents easy
We’ve all experienced that moment of frustration when we can’t put our hands on that document we worked on just a month or two ago. Did I save that under Proposals or April 2019? That problem multiplies when you’re working at a large organization, trying to collaborate across multiple teams whether they’re just across the building or a few oceans.....

A new kind of focus group fuels innovation and iteration
How much time do you spend searching for documents? The answer is probably somewhere between more than expected and far too much. Finding files in your immediate work group can sometimes be tricky, but finding shared files by other teams becomes more complicated when you don’t know who the author is, what the title is, or where to find the....

Learn vocabulary from the world around you with new Microsoft Garage project
In the first week of their Garage internship in Vancouver, eight interns were inspired by a Microsoft Education team challenge to build an app that could empower literacy. Today we’re excited to announce the opportunity for literacy NGOs and nonprofits to participate in an experiment that will test their work. Read My World, a Microsoft Garage project, is an app....