Just looking at 15 second speech recognition, the prices at Google are 50% higher and IBM about 25% higher. So kind of the same ballparks. Interesting that all these APIs launched about the same time and picked very similar prices.
Microsoft Cognitive Services
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Re: Microsoft Cognitive Services
#12Just looking at 15 second speech recognition, the prices at Google are 50% higher and IBM about 25% higher. So kind of the same ballparks. Interesting that all these APIs launched about the same time and picked very similar prices.
I'm guessing that the underlying algos and tech are all roughly the same so the costs are probably also very similar.
Re: Microsoft Cognitive Services
#13So I recently had a chance to use these APIs for a Microsoft hackathon project and wow are these APIs unstable right now. 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…
Weird because POS tagging takes linear time in the number of words.
Re: Microsoft Cognitive Services
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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? 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 s…
Watch as miniature data centers begin dotting the landscape to handle the latency issues.
How about a miniature data centre on a drone that follows you around, so you can use your phone?
Re: Microsoft Cognitive Services
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Watch as miniature data centers begin dotting the landscape to handle the latency issues.
How about a miniature data centre on a drone that follows you around, so you can use your phone?
A literal, physical manifestation of cloud conputing. David Ackley likes to call this the microcomputome[1].
Re: Microsoft Cognitive Services
#16So I recently had a chance to use these APIs for a Microsoft hackathon project and wow are these APIs unstable right now. 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…
Weird because POS tagging takes linear time in the number of words.
That's assuming a lot... there are many, many ways to do part of speech tagging. You could imagine a slow implementation that exhaustively considered every possible POS tagging for an input sequence (would be O(k^N) where k is # of parts of speech)
Re: Microsoft Cognitive Services
#17I remember seeing a comic[1] about this and thinking it's funny, eerie seeing it for real and in action.
Re: Microsoft Cognitive Services
#18AI is the new PC market. 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…
>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? 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 s…
Now with the margins going almost to zero and the return in computer diversity systems, what I see is the return of the vertical experience like we had in the 8 and 16bit home computers.
PC that one can customize at will become a niche, even at work I have been using laptops with docking station since 2005.
Re: Microsoft Cognitive Services
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Weird because POS tagging takes linear time in the number of words.
That's assuming a lot... there are many, many ways to do part of speech tagging. You could imagine a slow implementation that exhaustively considered every possible POS tagging for an input sequence (would be O(k^N) where k is # of parts of speech)
There's not really that much assumption. Given the fact that good and simple linear time algorithms exist for decades it's very unlikely that they use some ridiculous permutation enumeration algorithm.
Even a Microsoft Research project has a fairly complex reductions implementation of a POS tagger that is blazingly fast and production ready (learning to search interface). [1]
Re: Microsoft Cognitive Services
#20I have thought about this many times. What kind of startups or companies would actually pay for ML as a service at the initial stages knowing very well that
a) you are providing a lot of training data and instead of being paid for the service, you are actually paying for the privilege?
b) if your product/service takes off, there is a higher chance you will be competing not against similar startups, but rather a feature of the same company to which you just supplied all this training data (after all, you just helped them - in fact you paid them - to identify new markets for their service)
c) and hey, that data can also be combined with other data you do not have access to (in the worst case, it is remaining data which was supplied by your direct competitor and effectively completed the picture for the big company)
In other words, why would anyone invest in ML as a service with so many potential forces acting against your continued success?
To be clear, I don't refer to using the cloud services provided by these companies, which are often a lot more useful, because there are explicit clauses to prevent them from using your data for training(as I understand it).