Democratizing AI for agencies -- GCN

Agencies that want to incorporate artificial intelligence into their apps can take advantage of the five different categories of Cognitive Services now available on Microsoft's Azure Government Cloud. With the application programming interfaces and software development kits in Microsoft Cognitive Services, agencies can add emotion and video detection; facial, speech and vision recognition; and speech and language understanding to applications. To help agencies serve constituents with hearing disabilities, for example, an API can convert speech to text, help identify speakers and understand the intent in the tone of their voices. Language apps can provide multilingual services that help governments respond interactively to citizen requests, and knowledge and search apps can be used by bots or virtual assistants to access data from the web to answer questions. Chatbots or virtual assistants have piqued the interest of agencies that want to use them to respond to constituent requests 24 hours a day, lessening the burden on call centers that answer many of the same questions.