During its Ignite 2020 conference, which kicked off virtually this morning, Microsoft announced updates to Azure Cognitive Services and Azure Machine Learning aimed at streamlining business processes during the coronavirus pandemic. The company also launched two features in Azure Cognitive Search -- Private Endpoints and Managed Identities -- plus enhancements to Bot Framework Composer and the broader Azure Bot Service. "We're seeing AI touching every business across the planet, and so one of the key focuses we have with Azure Machine Learning is to provide our customers with the tools to really simplify the ability to create new models because we know they're going to need them in every area of their business," Microsoft corporate vice president Eric Boyd told VentureBeat in a phone interview. "This continues to be a key theme for us -- how we will really help our customers, enable more of their developers, and even more of their data analysts to build machine learn models and apply them in all aspects of their business." Private Endpoints in Cognitive Search, which is generally available as of today, allow a client on a virtual network to access data in an index over a private link.

If you've ever reached out to a company via email, direct message, or a phone call, you've probably been met with some type of chatbot service. Across a range of industries, companies are leveraging chatbot offerings to enhance customer service and reduce costs. As younger generations demonstrate an increasing desire for quick and efficient 24/7 service, the opportunity for chatbots continues to grow. The chatbot market size is projected to jump from $2.6 billion in 2019 to $9.4 billion by 2024 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 29.7%. And although the chatbot market is being tapped primarily by major companies and businesses, individuals have also started looking to chatbots as a means of engaging in alternative social interactions and everyday conversations.

Over the past few years, we have seen many examples of organizations applying conversational AI in meaningful ways. Accenture and Caesars Entertainment are making their employees more productive with enterprise bots. UPS and Asiana Airlines are using bots to deliver better customer service. And finally, BMW and LaLiga have built their own branded voice assistants, taking control of how customers experience their brand. These are just a few of the organizations that have built conversational AI solutions with Azure AI. This week at Microsoft Ignite, we announced updates to our products to make it easier for organizations to build robust conversational solutions, and to deploy them wherever their customers are.

Microsoft seeks to bring artificial intelligence and chatbots as a mainstream part of the workplace and it's taking steps to make it easier for partners to deliver AI capabilities directly into its popular Power BI reporting tool. At an event in San Francisco Wednesday, company officials revealed new AI capabilities coming to its Power BI self-service analytics tool with its new Azure Cognitive Services containers for partners without deep data-science development skills to deliver intelligent apps. Also looking to make it easier for partners to develop bots, Microsoft announced it has agreed to acquire XOXCO, a startup with expertise in conversational AI. Founded in 2013, XOXCO created the first commercial chatbot for Slack, a meeting scheduling app called Howdy. XOXCO is also known for its Botkit developer tool for building chatbot apps and providing native integration with messaging platforms.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as one of the most powerful forces in the digital transformation. At Microsoft, we believe developers, data scientists and enterprises should have easy access to the power of AI so they can build systems that augment human ingenuity in unique and differentiated ways. Today, at Microsoft Build 2018, as we engage in conversations about digital transformation with over a million developers, customers and partners, I am pleased to share some of our latest and most exciting innovations in the Azure AI Platform. Cognitive Services are cloud hosted APIs for developers to easily add AI capabilities such as speech recognition, voice synthesis, vision, language understanding, translation, knowledge and Search. To date more than a million developers have already discovered and tried Cognitive Services, including the major auto insurance provider Progressive, British Telecom, Box.com, KPMG, and Big Fish Games.

Cognitive Services--a collection of powerful cognitive AI APIs for vision, speech, language understanding, knowledge and search, which enables developers to easily add AI to their apps and services. Bot Framework makes it easy for developers to build and connect intelligent conversational AI to their customer experiences, and deploy these in their own custom UI as well as embedded in Skype, Microsoft Teams, Cortana, Bing as well as Facebook, Slack, etc. It's pretty clear that Cheng is a source of knowledge for all things AI and bot related so get ready to dive deep into her domain expertise in this insightful interview. Rosenthal: There are a number of bot frameworks in market, what's Microsoft's special sauce as it relates to their bot framework? What makes the Microsoft Bot framework unique? Cheng The Bot Framework is one component of Azure Bot Service, which includes the Bot Framework and BotBuilder software development kit.

In this episode, you will learn about the General Availability release of Azure Bot Service and Language Understanding service, the two top-notch AI services to create amazing conversational AI experiences. You will learn how to get started easily with Azure Bot Service to create a bot using out of box templates such as the Language Understanding template, and reach your audience with multiple supported channels.

IN A 2016 survey commissioned by software giant Microsoft, the company discovered that business leaders in Singapore are showing urgency in embracing the "Fourth Industrial Revolution", defined as the use of technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), advanced data analytics, and mixed reality, all powered by cloud computing. Three quarters of business leaders believe that they need to transform to a digital business to enable future growth. In just a few short years, both artificial intelligence and machine learning have become more efficient and accessible by more people. Jordi Ribas, Microsoft's corporate vice president in charge of AI products, said when people think of AI, they often think of high-tech, visible products like robots or AI-powered vehicles. What many people don't realise, Mr Ribas said, is that AI also is having a tangible impact on most people's lives through products like search or Microsoft's Office 365 productivity suite of apps.

Microsoft is giving enterprise developers the tools they need build business-friendly AI chatbots that will work across a variety of platforms. The company has announced the general availability of two key cloud services, Azure Bot Service and Language Understanding (LUIS), that are a part of its AI-powered Microsoft Cognitive Services. By combining these two services, enterprise developers will be able to create and deploy intelligent conversational apps that work across Microsoft's own apps and on a large variety of social media platforms as well. Azure Bot Service can be utilised to create conversational interfaces for websites, apps and messaging platforms or in Microsoft's own terms "channels." Developers will not have to adapt their code for each platform and their chatbots will work across the company's own apps and third-party apps such as Slack and Facebook Messenger.

Conversational AI, or making human and computer interactions more natural, has been a goal of computer scientists for a long time. In support of that longstanding quest, we are excited to announce the general availability of two key Microsoft Azure services that streamline the creation of interactive conversational bots, namely the Azure Bot Service and the Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS). The Azure Bot Service helps developers create conversational interfaces on multiple channels. LUIS helps developers create customized natural interactions on any platform for any type of application, including bots. With these two services now generally available on Azure, developers can easily build custom models that naturally interpret the intentions of users who converse with their bots.