Many of my customers, where I had the chance to do a workshop about Azure or Office 365 asked me the same question every single time: “How do you keep track with the updates on the roadmap?” I have to admit, the question is eligible due to the fact, that there is an update on the roadmap for both products nearly every day. So as a good consultant, you would need to spend all of your time studying the roadmaps to be on track and give your customers the newest information and advices in order to sell the best services and solutions.

The last days I was doing a lot of researches on AI and Cogntive Services as this topic is a major topic for the future in the daily use. So I read a couple of blog posts about this and got an idea on how to use it. And today I want to show you a small prototype application which I created in order to combine the Azure Cognitive Service API with my most used tool for work, which is Outlook and packed it into an Azure Logic App as I am not a developer (as you might know by now) in order to save development effort.

As you may know, Microsoft has released a Framework for building Bots on an Azure. You may encounter the problem that you are thrilled to start building a bot, but you don’t know how to begin and where to find the resources. So I thought of providing you with a list of useful resources and links on the Bot Framework which you may want to conduct: Links Official Microsoft Bot Framework Blog Bot Framework - Making Bots More Intelligent Forwarding activities / messages to other dialogs in Microsoft Bot Framework New Bot Framework features and updates Bots are banging: Getting Started with the Microsoft Bot Framework & Node.

Computer Vision Most of us will quickly bring image analysis in conjunction with high mathematical formulas and pattern recognition algorithms. The Computer Vision API but is based on a completely different level of abstraction. If one sends a picture of a squirrel on the service, “a squirrel is sitting on a rock” and a percentage chance comes in response, how much you can trust the statement. In addition, their position, as well as dominant color values can be queried tags and categories (animal, outdoor etc.

Microsoft just published a new article on the topic of Cognitive Services (formerlyProject Oxford). The Cognitive Services are a collection of SDKs and APIs along with services which should make your life easier if you want to build an intelligent application. These services basically leverage Microsoft’s existing platforms and services like Machine Learning and so on to enable developers to create applications with intelligent features like the following: Emotion Detection Video Detection Speech Detection Face Recognition Speech Recognition Vision Recognition Language Understanding Speech Understanding Our vision is for more personal computing experiences and enhanced productivity aided by systems that increasingly can see, hear, speak, understand and even begin to reason.