Microsoft Cognitive Services

Microsoft Cognitive Services
projectoxford.ai

Integrating various AI components to formulate something an user wants, uses, and values is going to be the foundation of this third tech wave.

Cogsci services will also be the biggest drivers behind cloud computing usage and thus one of the biggest drivers of revenue, hence why

Microsoft has doubled down on its Azure efforts, why Amazon is working hard to keep its AWS lead, and why other big corps like Alibaba and Baidu are jumping into the game.

Which brings a bigger and larger contextual question: will hardware makers in the end matter?

As in, that iphone you're clutching in your hand, will it go from smart to dumb once we move on to a software distribution model where by the device is but a high-res screen with a nice camera but running everything else remotely in the cloud somewhere?

Because that's the only way to get to point where we have universal computing, the kind of stuff in the movies where you can walk up to any glass anywhere and compute.

That sounds like it's going to have absolutely killer latency problems.

>Because that's the only way to get to point where we have universal computing, the kind of stuff in the movies where you can walk up to any glass anywhere and compute.

This sounds like it's going to have absolutely killer privacy and personalization problems.

I will pay a lot of money to buy hardware and software that actually shifts back towards programmable stuff that I actually own and can do what I want with.

That said, I really like Google Cloud’s new Machine Learning APIs [0], which go the extra mile and let you train & run your own models, in a NoOps kind of way. This is greatly useful because there is relatively little value, in my research so far, in just using pre-packaged models like Google Cloud Vision or Microsoft Cognitive Face Detection — most cases I’ve run into require building your own model, or transfer-learning to your own use-case. Kudos to Google Cloud for offering that in beta early, and I’m hoping Microsoft will follow suit!

[0]: https://cloud.google.com/ml/

I was trying to use their Linguistic Analysis API for POS tagging some text, and even for text as short as 500 characters, the API took over a minute to respond. If I bumped it upto a 1000 characters, the API would just error out and give a 500 status code without any explanation after keeping me hanging for over 5 minutes.

The same was the case with the speech to text API and some other ones as well.

As much as I appreciate there being something like this available for public use, these projects are effectively in alpha state and are not yet fit to be used in serious apps.