Microsoft adds new AI capabilities to Azure Cloud

Microsoft unveiled a lot of new AI capabilities at the Connect();-developer conference this week. Also within the public cloud Azure, developers will soon be able to rely more on artificial intelligence. The building and training of machine learning models will soon be available for developers and data scientists.

With the Azure Machine Learning Service, developers can accelerate most of the work involved in building and training machine learning models. One of the main functions in the service is the ability to automate the selection and refining of these models. The biggest advantage of this is of course that it is much easier to get the models running.

More updates

The Azure Machine Learning Service has been available as a public preview since September. However, from 1 February 2019 it will be available to the general public. But also some other new updates have been released for Azure. Also new is the Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB database service.

This database service offers distribution possibilities for several Azure regions. This is an important opportunity for companies that use Azure and at the same time need to be able to offer AI applications worldwide. The new Cosmos DB Shared Throughput Offer is now widely available and, according to Microsoft, offers an attractive entry fee.

Finally, Microsoft will update some of its Azure Cognitive Services. This makes it easier for developers to add more AI features to their applications. Azure Cognitive Services is a collection of programming interfaces that help apps understand exactly what people want. According to Microsoft, the best way to roll out these services is in containers. That way, developers can make sure that the experiences they build really work.

For this reason, Microsoft adds container support to its Language Understanding API preview. This enables developers to develop new systems that can understand specific languages and manuscripts.