For a machine learning junkie like me, there was lots to love at Build 2016! In this post, I'll fill you in on the machine learning announcements from Build. In summary, we announced previews of the Microsoft Bot Framework and the Microsoft Cognitive Services (formerly Project Oxford) for adding intelligence to your applications. The Microsoft Bot Framework allows you to build intelligent bots to interact with your users naturally in writing, using text/SMS, Skype, Slack, Office 365 mail, and other popular services. During the keynote, they showed an example Domino's Pizza bot which you could talk to (actually, type to) in natural language to order a pizza.

Microsoft launched support for text chat bots in Skype earlier this week and now a new bot made by the company is showing off what these AI creations can do. "Project Murphy" adds a new bot to your Skype contacts and then you can ask it "What if..." questions. The end result is a merging of two images that attempts to answer that question. Microsoft says that "Project Murphy" was a result of combining several of the company's services, such as Bing Image Search, Microsoft Bot Framework, Azure Stream Analytics, Azure Data Lake and PowerBI. Could we tap into this human creativity to build a robot that could use machine learning capabilities and create accurate and imaginative images based on the what-if questions it was being asked?