On July 18, US time, Microsoft released a message on its official blog: Microsoft Cortana wants to cooperate with Boeing. The Boeing company that helped Xiaonatian has just celebrated its 100th anniversary. In addition to the huge aircraft lineup, it also needs a special gift to celebrate his birthday.
Microsoft will port Boeing’s data aviation services to Azure Systems. A Microsoft spokesperson said: "Boeing can use Xiaona's intelligent system to help aviation personnel manage goods more effectively, arrange flight schedules for pilots and flight crews more rationally, or proactively arrange maintenance work based on data collected from the cloud. Flight delays due to aircraft maintenance."
This means that this cooperation between the two parties does not mean that Cortana is used to navigate the aircraft, but uses data analysis to process the large amount of information generated in the Boeing system on a daily basis. The ultimate goal is to reduce the time and material waste in the daily repetitive processes. Therefore, this is still a very preliminary cooperation.
However, this cooperation can indeed improve aviation services. Imagine that an “intelligent planner†has all information on aviation business and can make the most reasonable arrangements in advance: scheduling which aircraft to maintain, crew scheduling, making flight schedules, cargo shipments, etc. The system is likely to be more proactive and effective than most manually managed systems.
Of course, all artificial intelligence systems have the risk of being hacked, and people with ulterior motives will create unimaginable disasters by manipulating this system. In particular, industries such as the airline industry are heavily involved in the safety and security of millions of people. The importance of safety is self-evident. Microsoft and Boeing are clearly aware of this and stated that ensuring system security is always one of the most critical tasks.
Each of us, of course, hopes that aviation services will be more intelligent. For example, when you get off the plane to the place where you pick up the luggage, the luggage is already placed in front of you, instead of waiting for some time like now. However, this Cortana system will take some time to finally apply in practice. We will wait and see the concrete results of the cooperation between the two giant companies.