Getting Started with Microsoft Azure AI

For a list of Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services and demonstrations you can use with your own inputs (voice, images, text etc), please see https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/services/cognitive-services/. (Exploring these services has to be one of the most fun activities you can have whilst maintaining a legitimate claim to be working diligently.)

Microsoft's Machine Learning capability is very well established and ready to be incorporated in end to end solutions hosted in Azure. By way of evidence, demonstration and learning, at a click of a button you can deploy a range of ready built examples, ML experiments and solutions from the Cortana Intelligence Gallery https://gallery.cortanaintelligence.com/. To deploy requires an Azure subscription. Free trial subscriptions are available, but anyone in your organisation with a Visual Studio Subscription will have a monthly Azure budget they can use in an Azure subscription associated to their Visual Studio subscription. If you peruse the gallery you will find many examples that play straight into the hot topics of today.

The real time audio translator for PowerPoint from Microsoft Research (giving a good example of a technology coming down the line) is available here . Very impressive and well worth a look. It is the result of an experimental project that has immediate business use.

Intelligent Kiosk Here you will find several demos showcasing the Perceptual Intelligence power of Azure Machine Learning, the Cortana Intelligence Suite and the Microsoft Cognitive Services. (Again very amusing).

Create a bot with the Azure Bot Service The Azure Bot Service accelerates the process of developing a bot by providing an integrated environment that is purpose-built for bot development. This tutorial walks you through the process of creating and testing a bot by using the Azure Bot Service.?
- One of the template bots is the QnAMaker. This a very easy to create question and answer bot that can be made without any coding (or Azure subscription) and with just an faq file - here https://qnamaker.ai/. A short video tells you all you need to know.

There are about 20 Bot examples here
- Bot Examples https://github.com/Microsoft/BotBuilder-Samples. These can be deployed from the web page, with the prerequisite you register the bot in the https://dev.botframework.com/ before hand to gain an app id and password(key).
- More samples that correspond to tutorials in the documentation https://github.com/Microsoft/BotBuilder
When using Cortana as a Bot channel - currently you must use the English United States as the language setting in Cortana.

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