What is new in Microsoft Cognitive Services Azure Space?

As I have discussed many times before, the AI services landscape is aggressively growing and developing. Microsoft, AWS, IBM, and Google are in a crazy race to roll-out the most attractive services to the market, it is going fast to the extent that I usually question my last month knowledge if I get asked for the recommendation!

Last weeks, Microsoft had rolled out new services in their platform, which are: Immersive Reader, Personalizer, Form Recognizer, and Ink Recognizer.

Immersive Reader

A hot from oven service that was deployed just ten days ago! Immersive reader service makes it possible to make your application more understandable by a more full span of people with learning difficulties such as dyslexia. The service supports more than 60 languages, and the intelligence behind it is used by many Microsoft products.

The immersive reader provides the following capabilities:

• Shows content in a minimal reading view
• Displays pictures of commonly used words
• Highlights nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs
• Reads your content out loud to you
• Translates your content into another language
• Breaks down words into syllables

Personalizer

Do you wonder how YouTube can show you a recommendation of videos which you will most probably like? Or how Amazon & HM can show you product recommendations which are around your interest circle? The answer is short: Recommendation Algorithms.

Personalizer service makes it easy for you to implement product recommendation and personalization based on the user actions, hence, boosting up your business.

The personalizer service can be used in the following scenarios:

• Personalizing what articles to show in a website
• Optimizing ads
• Prioritize suggestions to the user

Form Recognizer

Well, let us agree: Information extraction from printed files are among the most daunting, tedious, and time demanding tasks for the businesses. Form recognizer service makes it possible to extract key/value pairs from a table in a printed documented and hence speeding up your business processes.

Ink Recognizer

Digital Ink refers to technologies used to collect digital ink which is a stream of information generated by specialized devices (e.g., a stylus pen) to receive the input in a specific format (e.g. [X, Y] coordinates) for the data to be processed. It is commonly used in the banking sector nowadays to verify digital signatures. Read here to find out how it differs from OCR (Optical Character Recognition).

The Ink Recognizer service supports the following:

• Handwriting recognition
• Layout recognition
• Shape recognition
• Combined shapes and text recognition

Finally

The AI ecosystem is running fast! We will catch-up, I will soon roll-out more tutorials around those fantastic services. Stay tuned, and do not forget to subscribe to the mailing list to get the latest and greatest lessons to make your code smart and your career smarter. This was all That is new in Microsoft Cognitive Services Azure Space.