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Hi, I'm Anna Roth,
a program manager on the Microsoft Cognitive Services team.
And I'm here to talk to
you today about what's new with Cognitive Services.
So Cognitive Services really sits at the nexus of a bunch of
the topics you've heard about today.
We're right there in between big data, powerful algorithms,
cloud computing.
But we can really think of Cognitive Services as Microsoft's
way of taking breakthroughs in machine intelligence and
make them easily accessible to you.
So, we have all these breakthroughs but
they're really enabling you to build intelligent applications.
So Cognitive Services includes 25 APIs
from a wide range of areas in machine intelligence.
So you have work that we've done in vision,
in speech, in natural language processing, knowledge and search.
Out of this we've built 25 APIs.
We don't have time to go through all of them today, but
we will talk through some highlights.
And I encourage you to check out the whole breadth of APIs at
Microsoft.com/cognitive.
So why Microsoft Cognitive Services?
So first of all they're easy.
These are all cloud services.
They're rest APIs.
They're designed to be very, very simple to use.
Things you can add to your application really trivially
to immediately start benefiting from these kind of technologies.
They're also flexible, by nature being cloud services.
You can integrate them with the language of your choice,
they're platform agnostic.
And finally, they're tested.
So, these are based on technologies that Microsoft has worked on for
decades.
You have work from Microsoft research, from Bing,
from our cloud and enterprise division.
All of the top research that we're using to power our
own applications is showing up and now accessible to you.
So you're using some of the same technology that powers Cortana or
powers Xbox.
But now you can add it to your own application.
And finally done our best to try to have quality of documentation to
make it super straightforward and
easy to be able to add these into your own application.
So, when we think about what to add as a cognitive service, we really
try to focus on what can you turn into real-world applications?
So in the vision category, we let you tag objects.
Identify whether they might be adult.
What colors are in those images.
Or something like speech, where you have speech to text.
So you can build apps where the mode of
interaction is speech rather than having to type click.
You have language.
So tools like LUIS, which make it very,
very easy to take arbitrary pieces of natural text, and
interpret what the intents and entities in that text are.
Or knowledge, so knowledge processing, searching unstructured
documents, using something like our Knowledge Explorer API.
Or search, getting real world search with, in this case, news search for
example where you're getting news in real time and
kind of structured content that you can easily add to your applications.
But we're really kind of focusing on how can you take
all of these breakthroughs in machine intelligence and
use them to make your applications better.
Today we have some exciting news.
So we have some APIs coming into general availability.
In particular, we have Face API, Computer Vision API, and
Content Moderator, all in general availability today.
So you have Face API, which has features like face detection.
So given a photograph, where are the faces in that photo?
What are some of the attributes of the faces in that photo?
For example, emotion is new today.
Also age, gender, etc.
Face verification, so are two photos the same person?
Similar face searching, so given a face is it similar to a group
of faces that you've previously trained.
Face grouping, so given a set of photos,
like maybe a family photo album,
can you group those into photos of Person A, photos of Person B?
You know, here's Person C that we've found.
And finally, face identification.
So, you can train a face group in Face API, of photos of people and
say, is this a photo of Alice?
Is this a photo of Bob?
Is this a photo of Sarah?
Let's take a look at Face API in action.
So here you can see our Face API.
So you can see it's making an inference there about my expression.
So when I smile it says happy, and also it guessed about my age,
it's little bit higher, but I think that's the stage lighting here.
There we go, that's better.
And because I previously actually trained this to recognize me,
when it sees my face it knows that it's Anna Roth.
And that was using just one picture.
We have some wonderful customers using Face API,
including Cloudinary.
And we're super delighted with what the Chief Product Officer of
Cloudinary had to say about using Face API.
Computer Vision API.
So with Computer Vision API, you can analyze an image.
So it tells you kind of what are the objects, or the items, or
categories in that image.
OCR, so recognizing the text in an image.
Generating thumbnails, and these are smart thumbnails.
You're not actually making the picture smaller, but
you're finding what is the kind of core interesting part of
a particular image.
Recognizing celebrities.
So, we recognize thousands of celebrities,
just based on their photographs.
And an exciting thing that's new today is our Landmark Recognition.
So, we're able to recognize important landmarks from
all over the world.
So let's take a look at Computer Vision API in action.
Image captioning is an amazing example of how research in
natural language processing and computer vision have come together.
Captioning is exposed in the Cognitive
Services Computer Vision API so you can use it in your own programs.
One common application of image captioning is for
accessibility purposes.
For example, PowerPoint users in the Office Insider program, now have
access to automated alt text generation via image captioning.
This feature makes presentations more accessible to people
who are vision impaired.
So let's take a look.
So I have my presentation here and I'm going to insert a picture.
So let's take this one here from, I got this mountain here.
And so you can see down here there is this automated caption generated,
a snow covered mountain.
Let's try another one.
A person riding a skateboard.
Now I can actually go in here and
edit that all text, if I would like to change it.
But, for now it looks good.
And we're delighted to have Prism Skylabs using Computer Vision API.
And here's a wonderful quote from Katie McCann,
Vice President of Product and Engineering of Prism Skylabs,
about their experience using Computer Vision API.
So I hope this has inspired you to get started with
Microsoft Cognitive Services.
It's very easy to get started, all 25 APIs you can get started and
try them out for free at microsoft.com/cognitive.
I'd also encourage you to take a look at Microsoft Bot Framework.
We have a lot of customers using the Cognitive Services
to add intelligence and excitement to their bots.
And, finally, to have a look at the whole end to end set
of analytics tools available from Microsoft
through our Cortana Intelligence suites.
Thank you very much for watching this video today.
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