Building Intelligent Apps with Cognitive APIs

Chapter 2. The Microsoft AI Platform

Microsoft uses AI broadly in its own products and services, and makes its learnings, techniques, and products available to developers through a variety of services, infrastructure, and tools. It all starts with Microsoft Research, which has been navigating the cutting edge of AI for over 25 years. Every day, thousands of researchers explore new ideas, tackle unsolved challenges, and develop innovative techniques that repeatedly set new records. These records range from designing ResNet (the algorithm that now underpins many image recognition systems) to matching human abilities in translation and in understanding images, speech, text, and questions.

The techniques developed by Microsoft Research already drive features in Microsoft tools like Windows and Office. These AI-powered features range from protecting your account from attack to suggesting the best layout for your PowerPoint slides. The techniques and services are also made available as tools for all types of users, ranging from data scientists looking to boost their productivity or take advantage of Azure’s cloud scale to developers who want to quickly infuse intelligent capabilities into their solutions.

Microsoft has also added AI into familiar products. For example, SQL Server Machine Learning Services offers an analytics engine that supports R and Python libraries inside SQL Server so developers can use machine learning like any other database functions they’re writing. Running ...