Microsoft demos next-generation image-captioning Captionbot

The power of the cloud is a bit fuzzy to most of us, but Microsoft wants to improve that by giving developers a series of API tools. The suite, dubbed Cognitive Services, empowers developers to make their software far smarter, including tools for trainable speech-to-text processing and a quality of object recognition verging on actual magic. Under the slogan of "Give your apps a human side," Cognitive Services is a collection of APIs for developers to use in their applications. Two examples demoed at the Build conference include a brand-new object recognition engine, which is likely to replace Project Oxford. To demo what this API can do, Microsoft created Captionbot.ai, which is a tremendously addictive (and science-fiction-grade awesome).