Is that funny? Microsoft develops AI that can assess comedy

Microsoft has added another type of artificial intelligence to its expanding array of machine intelligence systems (among other ventures as profiled in the article "How Microsoft's CEO Nadella has steered the company to success"). This is a form of face-scanning technology that can assess patterns of laughter and potentially assess the degree to which an event or person is found'funny' by an audience. The technology was showcased at the Laugh Battle exhibit which took place at the National Comedy Center in Jamestown, New York. Here a trial took place where the Microsoft technology was used to assess several performers and to determine which comedian was'best' at delivering their jokes based on an assessment of the reactions of the audience, according to Inverse. The reactions were processed by the platform's deep neural network, which was developed by Azure Cognitive Services.