AI Platform References for Developers

At this year’s Microsoft Build conference, we shared the landscape of Microsoft AI tools and technologies. The following developer reference provides an overview of the various AI platform tools Microsoft has to offer, with quick links to documentation, APIs, and sample code.

Bots

Bot Framework

Engage your customers more naturally and where they already are. The Microsoft Bot Framework makes it easy for you to create new experiences and reach your users at scale. Easily build and deploy across channels including Facebook Messenger, Cortana, Slack, Skype, and now Bing.

Bot Services

This integrated environment lets you build, connect, deploy, and manage intelligent bots that interact naturally wherever your users are talking—from your app or website to Text/SMS, Skype, Slack, Facebook Messenger, Kik, Office 365 Mail, and other popular services.

Cognitive services

Cognitive Services

This collection of powerful APIs enables your apps to intelligently interpret the world and to naturally engage your users through vision, speech, language, and knowledge. With a few lines of code, you can easily build apps that will learn, adapt, and advance over time, across a multitude of devices and platforms.

Academic Knowledge

With this API you will be able to interpret user queries for academic intent and retrieve rich information from the Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG). The MAG knowledge base is a web-scale heterogeneous entity graph comprised of entities that model scholarly activities: field of study, author, institution, paper, venue, and event.

Bing Autosuggest

With this API you can help your users complete queries faster by adding intelligent type-ahead capabilities to your app or website.

Bing Custom Search

This API allows developers to create a highly-customized web search experience, which delivers better and more relevant results from your targeted web space. Featuring a straightforward User Interface, Bing Custom Search enables you to create your own web search service without a line of code.

Bing Image Search

This API searches the web for images to serve up thumbnails, full image URLs, publishing website info, image metadata, and more.

Bing News Search

This API searches the web for news articles delivering results that include details like authoritative image of the news article, related news and categories, provider info, article URL, and date added.

Bing Speech

This API converts spoken audio to text. It can be directed to turn on and recognize audio coming from the microphone in real-time, recognize audio coming from a different real-time audio source, or to recognize audio from within a file.

Bing Spell Check

With this API you can help your users correct spelling errors, recognize the difference among names, brand names, and slang, as well as understand homophones as they’re typing.

Bing Video Search

This API searches the web for videos and serves up useful metadata including creator, encoding format, video length, view count, and more.

Bing Web Search

This is a REST API that enables organizations to create their own custom search engine needs that fit their primary intent, including customizing the sites that are searched and limiting scope intelligently, as well as applying the Bing ranker to deliver relevant search results with adjustable parameters.

Computer Vision

This API gives you the tools to understand the contents of any image: create tags identifying objects, beings, or actions present in the image, and then craft coherent sentences to describe it. This API will also now detect landmarks and handwriting in images.

Content Moderator

This API provides machine-assisted moderation of text and images, augmented with human review tools.

Custom Speech Service

This API enables you to create customized language models and acoustic models tailored to your application and your users.

Custom Vision Service

This API is a computer vision classifier service that users can train using custom data to recognize images that contain whatever they choose, whether that be people, animals, objects, words, or abstract symbols.

Custom Decision Service

This API learns from experience to make context-aware choices among a small number of actions to optimize a user-defined outcome measure.

Emotion

This API takes a facial expression in an image as an input, and returns the confidence across a set of emotions for each face in the image, as well as bounding box for the face, using the Face API.

Entity Linking

Given a specific paragraph of text within a document, this API will recognize and identify each separate entity based on the context.

Face

This API helps to detect human faces and compare similar ones, organize people into groups according to visual similarity, and identify previously tagged people and their emotions in images.

Knowledge Exploration Service

This API offers a fast and effective way to add interactive search and refinement to applications. With KES, you can build a compressed index from structured data, author a grammar that interprets natural language queries, and provide interactive query formulation with auto-completion suggestions.

Linguistic Analysis

This API uses advanced linguistic analysis tools for natural language processing, giving you access to part-of-speech tagging and parsing. These tools allow you to home in on important concepts and actions.

Language Understanding Intelligent Services (LUIS)

This API is designed to provide you with an easy way to create models, which allow your applications to understand user commands.

QnAMaker

This is a free, easy-to-use, REST API and web-based service that trains AI to respond to user's questions in a more natural, conversational way.

Recommendations

This API built with Microsoft Azure Machine Learning, helps your customer discover items in your catalog. Customer activity in your digital store is used to recommend items and to improve conversion in your digital store.

Speaker Recognition

This API identifies individual speakers or use speech as a means of authentication with the Speaker Recognition API.

Text Analytics

This API is a suite of text analytics services built with Azure Machine Learning. We currently offer APIs for sentiment analysis, key phrase extraction and topic detection for English text, as well as language detection for 120 languages.

Translator

This set of APIs can be seamlessly integrated into your applications, websites, tools, or other solutions to provide multi-language user experiences.

Video Indexer

This is an all-in-one indexing tool that deconstructs the many elements of video content, allowing you to explore, edit, and understand it better. This service provides rich insights without the need for software: it can identify objects, faces, and voices, extract keywords and topics from text and audio, analyze sentiment, and translate into 28 text languages.

Web Language Model

This API is a REST-based cloud service providing state-of-the-art tools for natural language processing. Using this API, your application can leverage the power of big data through language models trained on web-scale corpora collected by Bing in the EN-US market.

Project Prague (invite only preview)

This is an API to incorporate gesture-based controls into your apps. Quickly define and implement customized hand gestures, creating a more natural user experience. These are early preview SDKs with limited availability that allow developers to start experimenting with Microsoft’s latest and greatest Cognitive Services, including those announced at Build 2017.

Project Cuzco (preview)

This is an API to help developers find events associated with Wikipedia entities. Begin with a Wikipedia entity, and receive a list of related events organized by time. These are early preview APIs and SDKs with limited availability, that allow developers to start experimenting with Microsoft’s latest and greatest Cognitive Services, including those announced at Build 2017.

Project Johannesburg (preview)

This is an API to calculate route logistics with deep location intelligence to account for specific enterprise requirements such as weight, height length, hazardous materials, and more. These are early preview APIs and SDKs with limited availability, that allow developers to start experimenting with Microsoft’s latest and greatest Cognitive Services, including those announced at Build 2017.

Project Nanjing (preview)

This is an API to calculate isochrones - time and distance-based recommendations for enterprise route optimization. These are early preview APIs and SDKs with limited availability, that allow developers to start experimenting with Microsoft’s latest and greatest Cognitive Services, including those announced at Build 2017.

Project Abu Dhabi (preview)

This is an API to create distance matrices, enabling you to calculate a histogram of travel times, and serve as stepping stone for enterprise route optimization. These are early preview APIs and SDKs with limited availability, that allow developers to start experimenting with Microsoft’s latest and greatest Cognitive Services, including those announced at Build 2017.

Project Wollongong (preview)

This is an API to help ‘score’ the attractiveness of a location, based on how many of a amenities within a specific distance such as restaurants, parks, transit stops. These are early preview APIs and SDKs with limited availability, that allow developers to start experimenting with Microsoft’s latest and greatest Cognitive Services, including those announced at Build 2017.

Core infrastructure

Azure Batch AI Training Service (preview)

This is a new Azure service available in private preview. The Azure Batch AI Training Service allows developers and data scientists to configure an environment with parameters and run their model. They can run their models against multiple CPUs, multiple GPUs, and eventually FPGAs.

Azure GPU

At Build 2017, Microsoft demonstrated the ability to train machine learning models on new P40 and P100 GPUs, demonstrating exponentially faster mode training than on CPUs. Microsoft also announced a private preview program to sign up to train models on GPUs.

Data and analytics

Apache Spark for HD Insights

Apache Spark is an open-source parallel processing framework that supports in-memory processing to boost the performance of big-data analytic applications. Spark processing engine is built for speed, ease of use, and sophisticated analytics.

Data Factory

Azure Data Factory a cloud-based data integration service that orchestrates and automates the movement and transformation of data.

Data Lake Analytics

Azure Data Lake Analytics is an on-demand analytics job service to simplify big data analytics. Focus on writing, running, and managing jobs rather than on operating distributed infrastructure.

Stream Analytics

Azure Stream Analytics is a fully managed, cost-effective real-time event processing engine that helps to unlock deep insights from data.

Azure Machine Learning

Azure Machine Learning is a cloud predictive analytics service that makes it possible to quickly create and deploy predictive models as analytics solutions.

Tools

Cortana Skills Kit

The Cortana Skills Kit allows developers to build personalized and intelligent Cortana skills from scratch leveraging all the great Bot Framework features, combined with the Cortana channel, and Cognitive Services.

Microsoft R Server (MRS)

Deliver analytics with big data, predictive modeling, and machine learning to integrate with your critical applications, using data wherever it lives—the cloud, hybrid environments, or on-premises.

Vowpal Wabbit

The Vowpal Wabbit (VW) project is a fast, out-of-core learning system sponsored by Microsoft Research and (previously) Yahoo! Research. Support is available through the mailing list.

Deep Learning – Cognitive Toolkit

Our free, easy-to-use, open-source, commercial-grade toolkit trains deep-learning algorithms to learn like the human brain. Adopting programming languages and algorithms you already use, the Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit allows you to harness massive dataset intelligence with uncompromised scaling, speed, accuracy, and compatibility.