Microsoft Shows Digital Message Filtering

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March 13, 2001 (6:20 AM EST)

By Stephen Buel,

SAN JOSE, Calif.—Microsoft is watching you.

Microsoft Corp. (stock: MSFT) unveiled new technology Monday that lets people manage and filter their digital message traffic by encouraging their computer to observe them with cameras and microphones.

In a pair of short software demos during a speech to the quadrennial convention of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) by Microsoft president and CEO Steve Ballmer, the company demonstrated an application that serves as "an intuitive secretary" for computer users besieged by a surplus of digital message traffic.

This so-called Priorities software lets users set rules for which messages rise to the level of "urgent"— those that should be called to their attention instantly. Priorities relies upon user-provided cues to learn how a user views the urgency of messages directed to them via e-mail, instant messaging, mobile alerts, or via other digital means. It works in tandem with a utility that Microsoft calls the Notification Manager, which uses a Webcam, PC microphone, and other means to observe a computer user and assess their current receptiveness to interruption.

The Notification Manager studies a user's location, his current activity level, the presence of other people, ambient noise levels, and other such factors to determine whether he's working, thinking, or meeting with other people. Based on this assessment, the application concludes whether the user might be doing something such as eating, sleeping, dining, or traveling in a car. All the information is then used to determine which, if any, means of communicating with the user would be most appropriate at the moment.

Microsoft researcher Eric Horvitz said Priorities comes up with an urgency rating on a scale of one to 100 based on information from the header and content of a message, as well as based on the user's past history of interacting with messages from the same source.

Information such as the sender's relationship to the user in a company organizational chart can also be used to set a message's urgency. For instance, users might train the program to tag messages from their bosses with a very high priority.

In the demo that Horvitz showed to conference attendees, the highest-priority message in his in-box was 95 rating on a dispatch from a fellow Microsoft researcher who had found a new bug in some software under development. At the bottom of his in-box, with a priority rating of just 5, were e-mail messages from 1-800 Flowers and a company asking "Tired of Having Bad Credit?"

Based on these ratings, Horvitz said the application would decide where and when to alert him to the arrival of some or all of these messages, contacting him on whatever device he had set up to work with the application, from a PC or PDA to mobile phone or other device.

Horvitz said the application essentially runs "a cost-benefit analysis on every message coming into my cloud."

Priorities is not currently a standalone product but it does play a small role in Microsoft's new Mobile Manager application, which was released two weeks ago.

Ballmer also welcomed two other colleagues to the stage for a brief demonstration of Microsoft's new Digital Meetings video conferencing software, which enables computer users to inexpensively hold Web conferences that can be recorded for subsequent playback.

Recorded conferences can be played back at a faster speed and run more quickly using video compression technology. The software also allows viewers to search recorded proceedings for comments made by just one participant, or to search for specific comments using voice recognition technology.

Ballmer also stressed Microsoft's commitment to XML technology and a variety of ongoing research efforts.