Azure AI Services

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a category of computing that adapts and improves its decision-making ability over time based on its successes and failures.

There are two basic approaches to AI.

The first is to employ a deep learning system that’s modeled on the neural network of the human mind, enabling it to discover, learn, and grow through experience.

The second approach is machine learning, a data science technique that uses existing data to train a model, test it, and then apply the model to new data to forecast future behaviors, outcomes, and trends.

There are three primary product offerings from Microsoft, related to AI.

Azure Machine Learning

Azure Machine Learning is a platform for making predictions. It consists of tools and services that allow you to connect to data to train and test models to find one that will most accurately predict a future result. After you’ve run experiments to test the model, you can deploy and use it in real time via a web API endpoint.

Azure Machine Learning enables you to build models to predict the likelihood of a future result.

Azure Cognitive Services

Azure Cognitive Services provides prebuilt machine learning models that enable applications to see, hear, speak, understand, and even begin to reason. Use Azure Cognitive Services to solve general problems, such as analyzing text for emotional sentiment or analyzing images to recognize objects or faces. You don’t need special machine learning or data science knowledge to use these services. Developers access Azure Cognitive Services via APIs and can easily include these features in just a few lines of code.

Azure Cognitive Services includes Vision services that can identify the content of an image.

Azure Bot Service

Azure Bot Service and Bot Framework are platforms for creating virtual agents that understand and reply to questions just like a human. Azure Bot Service is a bit different from Azure Machine Learning and Azure Cognitive Services in that it has a specific use case. Namely, it creates a virtual agent that can intelligently communicate with humans. Behind the scenes, the bot you build uses other Azure services, such as Azure Cognitive Services, to understand what their human counterparts are asking for.

Azure Bot Service creates virtual agent solutions that utilize natural language.