Microsoft recently announced the general availability of – Azure Bot Service and Microsoft Cognitive Services Language Understanding (LUIS).
While Azure Bot Service will help developers to build conversational platforms on a variety of channels, the LUIS service will help them create customized natural interactions across any platform, application and even bots. With this development, the developers will get extended capabilities to create custom models that can interpret intention of humans conversing with bots.
“This announcement delivers on our AI Platform approach, providing developers and data scientists with all the tools they need to create AI applications in the cloud and on mobile devices” – said Lili Cheng, Corporate Vice President, Artificial Intelligence and Research Group.
With conversational AI, humans can converse with a bot, making human and computer interactions more natural.
Azure Bot Service is made available in various regions with advanced customization capabilities.
Language Understanding (LUIS) has also been expanded to cover more regions up to 500 intents and 100 entities. Developers can now create more conversational interfaces for mobile apps. LUIS is a part of Microsoft’s Cognitive Services which is a set of intelligent APIs. They enable systems to hear, see, understand or interpret human needs using natural process of communication.
Per Microsoft, more than 240,000 developers have already signed up for the Azure Bot Service.
Microsoft has not only been working towards making AI approachable for developers and data scientists, but is also trying to increase its adoption to provide better end user experience. Their recently announced partnership with Reddit can be considered a step towards fulfillment of this goal. Per which, Reddit will harness Microsoft’s AI technology to improve the search experience for Bing users.
