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 it has dubbed Cognitive Services to make their software far smarter, including tools for trainable speech-to-text processing and a whole new grade of object recognition. 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 includes a brand new object recognition engine, which is likely to replace Project Oxford. To demo what the API can do, Microsoft created Captionbot.ai, which is a tremendously addictive (and science-fiction grade awesome). The other API that was demoed was custom voice-recognition tools for audio recognition, to be able to recognise low-grade audio.