AI news from Microsoft's Build developers conference

At Microsoft's Build developers conference in Seattle this week, the company is unveiling a series of new and updated tools that will help developers incorporate artificial intelligence into their processes and applications, regardless of their background and training in the fast-emerging field of AI. A suite of new and enhanced pre-trained models from Microsoft Cognitive Services, for example, allow developers to easily add AI across vision, speech, language, knowledge and search to their applications. Many of these pre-trained models are now customizable to meet the specific needs of companies and their customers. Microsoft also is announcing a preview of Project Brainwave, a hardware architecture designed to accelerate real-time AI calculations. Project Brainwave is deployed on a type of chip from Intel called a field programmable gate array, or FPGA, and is integrated with Azure Machine Learning.