MSIgnite updates on AI at a glance
As the Microsoft Ignite is currently going on in Orlando, there are a lot of news and updates on all the various areas. The main focus areas which have been presented in the keynote are:
- Modern workplace
- Business applications
- Applications & infrastructure
- Data & AI
As you might already know I’m into all things AI, which is why I want to share the most recent and important updates on the AI ecosystem (Cognitive Services, Bots & ML) by Microsoft during the Ignite with you…
25.09.2017
Service Updates
- Text Analytics API is now generally available. Text Analytics is a cloud-based service that provides advanced natural language processing over raw text. It includes API functions such as sentiment analysis, key phrase extraction and language detection.
- Bing Custom Search API will be generally available in October. Bing Custom Search lets you create a highly-customized targeted web search experience to deliver more relevant results from your targeted web space through a commercial grade service.
- Bing Search APIs v7 will be will be generally available in October. Allowing you to bring the immense knowledge of the planet to your applications, the v7 update will provide several improvements, such as results coming back fast with improved performance for queries on the Bing Web Search API . New sorting and filtering options make it easier to find relevant results in news trending topics and image searches. Better error messages make it easy to troubleshoot and diagnose problem queries, and updated, modernized documentation make it easy bring the power of the Bing Search APIs to your applications.
- Changes to the Language Understanding Intelligent Service and Microsoft Bot Framework are planned, which contain everything you need to build and connect intelligent bots, generally available later this year.
New Capabilities
- QnAMaker preview API is now enabling to build, train and publish a simple question and answer bot from product manuals.
- Face API , Computer Vision API and Content Moderator are expanding in 7 additional regions - South Central US, West US2, East US, Brazil, North Europe, Australia East and East Asia.
If you want to know more about these updates, take a look at MSIgnite AI Updates 25.09.2017
But that’s not enough. Joseph Sirosh (Corporate Vice President for the Cloud AI group at Microsoft) also showed an important slide during his session “The Microsoft AI platform” which should give an overview of the AI platform within Azure:
26.09.2017
Service Updates
- Azure Machine Learning: Adding support for Azure Batch AI (Roadmap)
- Azure Machine Learning: Rolling out to more regions (Roadmap)
- Azure Machine Learning: Onward to GA (Roadmap)
There have not been any announcements on service updates regardingCognitiveServices unfortunately. But what the Bot Framework is concerned, Vishwac Sena Kannan showed an interesting slide in his session Let’s talk about Conversation Design about the growth and usage of this awesome framework which you can see below:
New Capabilities
- Azure Machine Learning: 2 new services (Experimentation & Model Management Service )
- Azure Machine Learning: New Tools (Visual Studio Code Tools for AI & Azure Machine Learning Workbench )
- Azure Machine Learning: AI powered data wrangling
- Azure Machine Learning: Deploy models to the Edge (e.g.: IoT solutions)
- Azuer Machine Learning: Layered & hierarchical model deployment possible
- SQL Server 2017: Support for R and Python
27.09.2017
Unfortunately, I have not spotted any roadmap updates for all of these services, but I would take this opportunity to list some really cool sessions you should watch on demand if you are not at Ignite like me:
- Language with Microsoft Cognitive Services: infusing language and speech capabilities into your apps
- Microsoft Cognitive Services - Infuse intelligence into your business app with Vision and Speech
- Let’s talk about Conversation Design
- Bot Framework patterns and practices straight from our customer
The last session about Bot Framework patterns and practices gives a nice overview of the lessons learned which you can see below:
