Yesterday, Microsoft released two of its major AI services for the developers: Azure Bot Service and Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS). These services provided via the Azure Cloud platform will help businesses in building chatbots and language comprehension.
More specifically, the Bot Engine will provide a managed service to the companies for building ‘intelligent automated conversation partners.’ LUIS allows customers to create smart engines that can parse the written text into a usable form for other applications.
Both the services aim to offer AI technology benefits for businesses while cutting down the expense of domain expertise. Simultaneously, Microsoft can manage to stay in the loop of the present ad seemingly everlasting progressive market competitions.
As per yesterday’s report by Harry Shum, Head of Microsoft’s AI and Research Group, 760,000 developers are presently using the company’s Cognitive Services, which is pre-built APIs offering smart features. This is certainly a progressive mark for the tech titan as it competes with the likes of AWS, Google Cloud, and others.
Shum further added that developing AI language interfaces is quite grueling in terms of the field’s future. He endorses the communicative abilities of computing devices, leading the company to build chatbots like Zo in the U.S. and Xiaoice in China.
Alongside these accomplishments, Microsoft Research launched a new Health Bot Project project that aims to create bots for healthcare environments. It offers a HIPAA-compliant environment for smart assistant creations that can help answer queries on symptoms, health insurance, and locations of nearby doctors.
In order to create bots using the system, the company is collaborating with Aurora Healthcare and Premera Blue Cross. At the same time, it has opened applications so that other medical providers can go for trials. This was a part of several AI announcements of Microsoft yesterday, which include new features for Cortana, Bing, and the Office 365 productivity suite.
