Delving Deeper
Microsoft Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing service, where a company can run applications on servers managed by Microsoft. Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services is a category of applications that Azure supports most related to natural language uses such as bots and assistants. Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services includes Natural Language Processing (“Language Understanding”), supporting building natural language understanding into apps, bots, and IoT devices. It also includes speech-to-text (speech recognition), text-to-speech, speech translation, and speaker recognition. QnA Maker in Cognitive Services is a cloud-based API service that lets a company create a conversational question-and-answer layer over existing data. It can build a knowledge base by extracting questions and answers from semi-structured content, including FAQs, manuals, and documents. It answers users’ questions with answers automatically derived from the Q&As in the knowledge base andcontinually learns from user behavior.Also in Cognitive Services, Text Analytics can detect sentiment, key phrases, and named entities in unstructured text. Translator Text can detect and translate more than 60 supported languages. Text Translation can detect and translate more than 60 supported languages. A “Content Moderator” can detect potentially offensive or unwanted content. Bing Custom Search can create a custom search engine with ad-free results.Windows 10 development frameworks provide speech recognition, speech synthesis, and conversation support for developers building Windows applications without requiring using cloud services.