Microsoft Launches Several New Machine Learning Services and Extends Its Cognitive Services

Before its Build Developer Conference, Microsoft released several new Machine Learning services and Cognitive Services updates, ranging from no-code tools to hosted notebooks, with several new APIs and other services in-between. The Cognitive Services updates include an API for building personalization features, a form recognizer for automating data entry, a handwriting recognition API, and an enhanced speech recognition service that focuses on transcribing conversations. According to a TechCrunch article around updates for Cognitive Services, an essential service is Personalizer – a service providing a machine learning technique that doesn't need the kind of labeled training data typically used in machine learning. Microsoft VP Scott Guthrie, leading the company's Cloud and AI Group, said in a VentureBeat article: Use of Personalizer in Microsoft stores and online systems has led to performance improvements of more than 40% in some instances. Note that users can leverage Personalizer next to existing recommendation tools on the Azure platform.