>> You're not going to want to miss
this episode of the AI show,
where we go through all of the cool new things that
Noelle is bringing us from Cognitive Services.
Take a look. Welcome to another episode of the AI show,
where we learn about Cognitive Services
with Noelle. How are you doing my friend?
>> Wonderful. Thank you for asking.
>> All right.
So, why don't you give us just a quick overview
of what Cognitive Services are,
and why people should use them, and then maybe get
a say what's happening post Bill.
>> Awesome. I would love to. So, I
actually run developer experience.
So, I'm super excited and passionate about trying
to help developers use
our technology a little bit easier,
and we've got some great updates
coming up and that are available now.
But before we get into the updates,
maybe there's some people out there who
aren't really familiar with what we do.
So, first off, we like to
create models that are easy to consume.
So, we've created a bunch of Web APIs,
RESTful API that allow you to leverage,
several different types of
services that allow you to maybe
take advantage of vision or speech,
or really just make your applications more interactable,
discoverable, engaging, than what you could do otherwise.
They're super flexible, which what that
really means to you as a developer,
is that we want you to code in
the language of your comfort zone.
Right. So, if you're a Java developer do that.
If you're Node do that.
Python do that, and of course.Net.
We want to support that as well,
and of course heavily tested.
We've got a really large community of developers and that
includes our audience that is providing us feedback.
We're constantly- one of the nice things
I like about our products,
is that we are leveraging
our community to give
us insight into how to drive our roadmap.
>> Awesome.
>> So, as we look at those different things
where people are like, "Man, it'd be awesome,
if you know vision could do this, or voice could do that,
or if I could create
my own custom voice font that would be amazing."
We use that to drive what we decide to invest in.
>> Cool.
>> So, what we're going to spend the next few minutes on,
is where those investments ended up
landing us for the next six months or so.
So, Vision is one,
for those who don't know Vision,
it's faces to feelings.
The ability to moderate your content
and keep good content in and bad content out.
The ability to just analyze
existing video content images and most importantly,
sentiment analysis might be able to
identify from what people are saying,
how they're looking, the expressions on their face,
be able to analyze that.
So, some of the new things we
have coming out in Computer Vision,
one is object detection.
So, you'll be able to
see now as you go into our documentation,
we have lots of demos of how you can while you're looking
at a video you can detect objects in the area.
So, one of the things I like
to think about is like I have
a son who constantly forgets
his backpack as he's heading downstairs,
and so I'm very interested
in making sure that something can tell him,
"Hey, your backpack is on the floor," and now we
have object detection that can detect, "Oh!
There's a backpack sitting on the floor."
Now, I can integrate that with speech,
have a little Bot,
tell him, "Hey, don't forget to pick that up."
>> I could totally see myself
skinning this out to Parenting as a Service.
>> Yes. Amen brother.
>> There you go.
>> Another thing Custom Vision
is now one of the things we want to do is
not only allow you to kind of
leverage these services out-of-the-box,
but we also want you to then
take them and customize them.
Right? So, Custom Vision
is adding the ability to export your models.
Export them in an industry standard format,
and then be able to have them
inferred in multiple different areas.
>> That's probably one of my favorite things,
because like you can train the thing,
download or run on the Edge on your device.
>> Right.
>> One of the coolest things and now the ONNX format,
you'd be able to use something like WinML.
>> Exactly.
>> Really fast application.
>> Yeah. Exactly. And then finally just a quick shout
out to Video Indexer. What a great technology.
I remember the days where I used to index my own videos,
and like have to watch them
and figure out where things were
starting and to try and create
some kind of table of contents for videos.
Now, you ingest a bunch of videos that's
now generally available or not generally available,
but in paid preview on Azure.
So, it's part of your Azure subscription,
making it just easier for developers to consume.
>> Awesome.
>> The next one is speech.
So, again for those developers
who are kind of new to speech,
this is the ability just to create a human interface,
a voice interface for your technology.
We've got some big updates here.
We really want those who have used speech in
the past probably recognize that we had
a lot of different speech services,
and this is the benefit of coming
out of a research organization.
We have lots of teams building the same thing,
but we finally evolved to
a point where we're centralizing
all of that are unifying that into a single location.
>> Nice.
>> Yeah. So, we'll have a single way
of interacting text-to-speech,
speech-to-text, Intent recognition all
of that will be in the same package.
So, that's again from a developer perspective,
that's hugely important rather than having to track down,
and even chase down updates and what's moving.
Right now we have a single place that we can look.
>> This is awesome. Like the one I
haven't tried yet that I really want to do
is the voice output text-to-speech. That's amazing.
>> Yes. Well, and just this morning, I was looking at,
we were building a Bot,
and we wanted that Bot
right using the Bot framework awesome.
But now we wanted it to be able to leverage.
Right? To not only take in text,
but then to either take in text and output audio,
or take in audio and output audio and text.
Anyway, like all of this together
now creates a very compelling stage.
>> We can learn with the translation stuff,
we can literally make like a universal translator.
>> Yeah.
>> That speaks.
>> I know, I think about on time every
time I speak like on stage,
I'm like man to be awesome from
people to just have a little app.
They start up an insanely such
translating whatever I'm saying.
>> Nice.
>> That'd be so cool. So, another part of speech.
This is another one of my favorites
is Custom Speech Models.
So, every business, every developer that's building for
an enterprise has these like weird words
that a model won't pick up.
Right? Where you'll say some acronym,
and the default model
will pick up some random phonetic spelling.
But it won't map to anything,
and it's very difficult to map it to an intent.
So, now we have the ability to actually customize and
build specific models against those special words.
The special vocabulary in the company,
maybe even words that aren't real words like kryptonite.
>> Right.
>> Being able to leverage build
a speech model that understands
the kryptonites of your company.
And then of course, being able to deploy them.
Another, this is more fun in my mind than
the practicality of being able to create
like a specialized speech model.
But you can also use Custom Voice Models,
and this has also been called like Voice Fonts.
Right? Being able to create a special way for you to
tailor the brand of
your business around a certain type of voice.
Right? So, for example,
we all know what it sounds like when we hear
like the NBC chimes.
Right? Like there's certain sounds Jeopardy's song.
We all recognize these things.
So, as we start moving into this human interface,
we need to think about what does our business sound like,
what does our Q and A Bot sound like,
and so this allows you to really tailor
what that sound is.
>> That's cool.
>> Yeah. And then of course there's language.
A lot of usage,
our developers are using this
heavily in the area of translation,
but there are a couple of other updates
we wanted to talk about as well.
One is sentiment analysis,
Key phrase extraction, Language detection.
Those are all things we've been doing
for a while and pretty successfully,
I think a lot of developers appreciate this.
>> The thing about like if
I'm at again on the high horse here,
the Key phrase extraction to me is amazing,
because some people like to say a lot of things,
and if you're able to take out what's most important,
you're able to make Bots that can actually help
people based upon what
they say and what's most important.
>> Right. A lot of our content tends to be very verbose,
because some of us got kind of paid by
page as opposed to by content.
So, this allows you to really isolate
and leverage that information more effectively.
So, in addition to that,
we now have the ability to also
identify top entities within this text.
So, it's just a level of
improvement on our Text Analytics giving you
the ability to now rather than just
getting kind of this huge list of important things,
now you can identify even entities that
have special level of importance within that list.
So, it should help you classify to a greater extent.
>> That's amazing because I did Any R,
it was named Any Recognition
back in the day when I was in grad school.
It was a hard problem,
but now with the deep learning models that we're
using obviously, we're doing a lot better.
>> Absolutely, and that's one of the big challenges again
usually language in speech,
instantly fall off the table for some developers
because some of these blocks they run into.
Right, and this is one of those key ones
like, "Oh my gosh,
how do I create the synonyms for all
of the different ways someone might think about this."
This entity extraction and the ability to
bubble up top entities
will save them huge amounts of time.
>> Awesome.
>> Yeah, and then we have Translator.
Translator actually is what we're
doing the big thing that I want to call to
your attention here is that we're
simplifying the speech-to-intent process.
So, again another hard
problem we had to solve before it was a lot of
manual alignment between what
the user is saying and what we know they want to say,
or what they mean to say.
So, now we're able to automate that quite a bit.
Translator text of course and Translator speech again,
they're doing very similar things.
We're adding additional languages.
We're increasing its availability,
but really the ability to limit how much time you spend
aligning Intent is going to be a game changer.
>> Awesome.
>> Then of course knowledge, this is the big one.
Q and A Maker has been in preview for a while,
it's finally generally available,
and this is an instant kind
of return on investment for a developer.
Right. You can go into your business and say,
"Do we have a PDF anywhere?
Do we have content anywhere?
That could easily be
generated into like a conversational Bot.
You could think about anything like HR,
where they're answering the same questions all day long,
or any any kind of PDF,
like I remember going into hospital and they gave me
this PDF of like all
the common things that I would need to know,
like where the coffee maker is,
and like how when
the cafe is open, when the gift shops open.
Why am I not allowed to have balloons?
Like all these things.
But now, they can have a Bot in these rooms,
and I can chat with it,
and it's much better from a customer experience.
>> Because there are certain things that come up.
In the moment they come up,
and you have this doc,
when you showed up it's like,
"I'm going to look at that you throw it
in your junk folder or something."
>> Exactly, exactly. Or it
has coffee rings on top of it. Right?
>> That's right.
>> So, this is huge to be able to bubble up
the most important information that users need.
But what we call a top-level Intent,
like is they only have to ask for it once.
They're don't have to click through five things.
They don't have to flip through 10 pages.
They can ask for exactly what they want,
and it bubbles it up to the surface.
>> That's cool.
>> Really great for customer experience.
Search has a lot of great stuff going on as well,
and in Search of course,
there's seven APIs, a lot of
great functionality in there
that developers can use immediately.
But I wanted to caught your attention to
a couple of the new things that we're doing.
For example, retrieving web documents,
that's not a new thing.
But custom Search is
really kind of what we want to focus on.
Right. So, being able to customize how a search is done,
being able to customize how if I
pass in a specific picture of
something or better yet imagine,
I was just sat like
Bartell Drugs and I'm like "Oh my gosh,
I need new makeup," and I go
in this 200 shades of makeup.
So, I'm like "Man,
isn't it possible I could take a picture of
my face and pass out to you" and you'd say,
"Here's the stuff that matches you.".
>> Oh, yeah.
>> Right, that would be awesome, and Visual Search is
an easy way to do that for a company like that.
Also, how well are you doing, right?
How do we get analytics on how well
the Search statistics are actually
performing for my business,
for my specific subset of this.
So, we have a Bing Statistics
add-in that's become available,
and then finally of course,
all of these are now readily
available in SDK of your choice,
and I think that's huge because again we don't want
you to have to be
a certain type of developer to leverage these.
We want to make available across
as many languages as we can.
And of course if there's
language we don't support, we want to know.
So, we encourage developers to let us know that feedback.
>> Absolutely, and this is cool stuff like you
have an instant Search engine for your website,
plus now all these cool things
like being able to search pictures on Bing,
being able to add other cool things,
and then the statistics one, I think is pretty cool.
>> Yes. It's going to be great. So, we always like
to finish with some developer resources,
but that really wraps up all
of the cool new things that you've
got going on right now and yeah, thanks.
>> Awesome.
Thanks so much for spending some time with us.
You have just gotten a lap
around what's new in Cognitive Services.
If you're not using them,
you should start today,
there's a free tier where you can start making calls,
and see if it's something you want to do,
and just adding that little sprinkle of AI
into your application makes
everything a little bit better.
Thanks so much for spending time with
us. Thanks so much watching.
You were watching the AI show all about
Cognitive Services. We'll see you next time. Take care.