Microsoft brings customization to its pre-built AI services

Microsoft is doubling down on its cloud AI services for business customers with a fleet of new offerings aimed at helping companies deal with video and unique problems not solved by its off-the-shelf cognitive services. New services announced Wednesday include a new Video Indexer service that will provide customers with automated captioning, sentiment analysis, custom face recognition, object detection, optical character recognition and keyword extraction of videos they provide. The tool is built on existing Microsoft services, but gives customers an easier way to process large amounts of video for indexing and analysis rather than require manual work by humans. Also new is a custom image recognition service that allows users to take Microsoft's existing tools for detecting objects and teach them to recognize other things that aren't generally applicable. For example, manufacturers could use the service to identify different types of parts that Microsoft's off-the-shelf image recognition service couldn't recognize, according to Irving Kwong, a principal product manager in the company's artificial intelligence group.