Hell freezes over: We wrote an El Reg chatbot using Microsoft's AI

Hands on Microsoft has invested big in its Cognitive Services for programmable artificial intelligence, along with a Bot Framework for using them via a conversational user interface. How easy is it to get started? Cognitive Services, the AI piece, was announced at the company's Build developer conference in April 2015. The initial release had just four services: face recognition, speech recognition, visual content recognition, and language understanding. That has now been extended to over 20 APIs. Note that Cognitive Services, which are pre-baked specialist APIs, are distinct from Azure Machine Learning, which lets you do generalized predictive analytics based on your own data.