Microsoft's bid to bring AI to every developer is starting to make sense

SEATTLE--For the third year in a row, Microsoft is heavily promoting machine-learning services at its Build developer conference. Over the three years, some of the language used around the services has changed--the "machine learning" term seems to have fallen out of favor, being replaced by the better-known "artificial intelligence," and Microsoft has added many more services. But the bigger change is that ubiquitous intelligence now seems a whole lot more feasible than it did three years ago. Three years ago, the service selection was narrow--a language service that identified important elements from natural language, speech-to-text and text-to-speech, an image-recognition service, a facial recognition service. But outside of certain toy applications, such as Microsoft's age-guessing website, the services felt more than a little abstract. They felt disconnected from real-world applications.