The 2021 edition of the Microsoft Build conference took place from May 25 to 27, 2021 online. The opportunity for the multinational to present some of its new technology and artificial intelligence. The firm presented its latest programming tool called Power Apps Ideasthat allows anyone to code using commands written in natural language.

A tool to simplify the coding process

In order to design algorithms, it is necessary to write the code that corresponds to the set of possible operations or instructions to solve a task. Coding has evolved and become more democratic thanks to the appearance of widespread languages such as JavaScript or Python: they are more intuitive to understand than other languages and allow to widen the scope of coding.

Nevertheless, for neophytes, beginners or people who are not properly initiated to these languages, it is complicated to develop relatively complex programs, even with “simplified” programming languages. Taking this into account, Microsoft announced at Microsoft Build 2021, its Power Apps Idea tool: a platform that can help any user to design algorithms or applications using natural language.

Power Apps Idea leverages Open AI GPT-3

In order to design the tool, Microsoft teams slightly tweaked the OpenAI GPT-3 (Generative Pre-Trained Transformer-3) AI model so that it could automatically generate Power Fx language formulas based on natural language text input. The model was trained using deep learning with 175 billion parameters to be able to understand and generate natural language text and translate it into the programming language developed by Microsoft.

Let’s take an example: let’s imagine a sales employee at a stroller supplier. He or she wants to sort one of his or her databases to display 10 stroller orders sorted by date of purchase with the most recent first. With Power Apps Idea, it is now possible to enter this request word for word and the tool translates it into code, like this:

The tool works with Power Apps, Microsoft’s service for creating and using custom business applications that can connect to developer data.

The different ways to use Power Apps Idea

Translating natural language into code allows for several possibilities:

• The tool can allow a user to talk about what they would like to implement through coding without spelling out all the tasks they would have to perform. If an employee of a video-on-demand service wants to know the list of U.S. users whose subscriptions have expired, he or she simply writes in the text bar “show me U.S. customers whose subscriptions have expired,” and the platform offers several codes. The user then simply selects one that will perform the task.

• The platform allows users to program “by example” using the Program Synthesis using Examples (PROSE) feature already included in other tools developed by Microsoft. The user can propose an example of what he wants to implement. Let’s say you want to display the initial of a person’s last name, then you just have to propose in the text bar “Eric T.” for example and the tool will suggest the formula that will transform your whole database so that only the initial of the person is displayed.

Below, the user asks the application to remove the text after the arobase of an email address:

• In addition to translating natural language into code, Power Apps Idea will offer an explanation of how all the code a developer wants to generate works, helping them to better understand its use.

A tool resulting from a strategic partnership with Open AI

The design of this platform fits into the existing strategic partnership between OpenAI and Microsoft. In 2019, the IT giant announced it was investing $1 billion in OpenAI to develop strong artificial intelligence and climate change solutions.

With its new tool, Microsoft is committed to its principles of responsible AI and claims that the use of AI in this platform is “fair, inclusive, reliable, while respecting data privacy and security.” Power Apps Idea will be available as a preview in June 2021 so that users can test the features in Power Apps‘ data galleries and tables. With this platform, the firm hopes to help all developers build better apps.

Translated from Microsoft Build 2021 : annonce de la fonctionnalité NLP “Power Apps Idea” pour coder plus facilement