Cognitive Services APIs: Vision - Building Apps for Windows

What exactly are Cognitive Services and what are they for? Cognitive Services are a set of machine learning algorithms that Microsoft has developed to solve problems in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The goal of Cognitive Services is to democratize AI by packaging it into discrete components that are easy for developers to use in their own apps. Web and Universal Windows Platform developers can consume these algorithms through standard REST calls over the Internet to the Cognitive Services APIs. So why is it worthwhile to provide easy access to AI? Anyone watching tech trends realizes we are in the middle of a period of huge AI breakthroughs right now with computers beating chess champions, go masters and Turing tests.