What if you could train a digital assistant on what was important to you and teach it to do tasks, like look up today’s pollen count, book the next open local campsite, or alert you when an item goes on sale? The grand prize winning team of Microsoft Hackathon 2020 did just that with their customizable digital assistant project, built as an extension for Microsoft Edge. A person can train this digital assistant to do any number of tasks, and because the machine learning is highly personalized by the individual, accurate and relevant, each user’s model can learn quickly without the need for huge quantities of data. If the assistant gets something wrong, the individual can retrain it on the correct things, providing continuous feedback to improve their personal assistant over time.
With complete virtual participation this year, thousands of teams like the winning team seized the opportunity to take part in the company-wide Hackathon and brought countless ideas to life.
Read more about the grand prize winning team and their Hackathon experience: What if you could train your browser what to do? Customizable digital assistant wins Microsoft’s first all-virtual Hackathon (Microsoft News original story, by Leah Culler)
