Microsoft's Azure gets all emotional with machine learning

Imagine if the things around your house could respond to your voice even when you were shouting over a smoke alarm, keep track of each individual wandering through the house, unlock your front door just by identifying your voice, and even identify your emotions. Those are all capabilities that Microsoft is preparing to add to its Project Oxford, a set of cloud-based machine learning services introduced last May at Microsoft's Build conference. Ars took a deep dive on Project Oxford's first wave of machine learning-based services last year. Those services performed a number of image processing and recognition tasks, offered text-to-speech and speech recognition services, and even converted natural language into intent-based commands for applications. The services are the same technology used in Microsoft's Cortana personal assistant and the Skype Translator service, which translates voice calls in six languages (and text messages in 50 languages) in real-time.