NEWS

Cognitive Services APIs: Knowledge “Ipsa scientia potestas est.” – Sir Francis Bacon In the last two posts in this series, we covered the Speech APIs and the Language Understanding APIs. In the current post, we’ll go over the Knowledge APIs. There is a natural progression to this since from speech, we derive meaning, and with meaning we obtain knowledge. The Knowledge APIs provide ways to link our collective knowledge and to access that knowledge in more effective ways. Academic Knowledge API Sometimes we want to find out what our social networks are saying about a given topic, like a recent wardrobe malfunction at a star-studded celebrity event. The Academic Knowledge API isn’t for that and would return terrible results if we tried. The Academic Knowledge API, as you might guess from the name, acts as a computer librarian for retrieving [ more… ]

This Week on Windows: Doctor Strange, The Walking Dead and Halo Wars 2: Live We hope you enjoyed today’s episode of This Week on Windows! Catch up on all the news about security trends & Windows 10 and Spectator View, a new tool to help others see what you see in HoloLens. Or, head over here for tips on how to declutter your digital space and stay organized with Task View and Snap! Here’s what’s new in the Windows Store this week: Tune in today to Halo Wars 2: Live We’re only days away from the official launch of Halo Wars 2 next week, and just a few hours from early access availability tomorrow! As announced back in January, Xbox is celebrating the launch of Halo Wars 2 by inviting you to tune-in to a livestreamed launch event hosted at [ more… ]

Making the Windows Insider Program better for our IT Pro and business customers Hi Windows Insiders! Hello from Ignite Australia on the Gold Coast. Here this week, we’re participating in several keynote and breakout sessions featuring the Windows Insider Program and our community. One thing I’m excited to showcase here is our commitment to an important part of the Windows Insider Program, IT Professionals. We’re incredibly honored and empowered by the IT Pros participating in the Windows Insider Program to evaluate Windows 10 and its features as part of their deployment process. We in the Windows Insider Program believe IT Pros play a crucial role in ANY organization as the drivers and enablers of Digital Transformation, regardless of industry. As our CEO Satya Nadella says, “every company is a digital company.” With over 40% of Windows Insiders working in IT, [ more… ]

Cognitive Services APIs: Language In the last post, you saw how AI is used to turn speech into text through the Cognitive Services Speech APIs. Once sounds have been converted into written text, they still have to be distilled for their meaning. Human language, however, is rich in ambiguities and understanding a sentence correctly can sometimes be extremely difficult, even for experienced humans. We have multiple ways to say the same thing (morning star and evening star both denote the planet Venus), while the same sentence can have multiple meanings (‘I just shot an elephant in my pajamas’). The Language APIs attack the problem of meaning from many different angles. There isn’t enough time at the moment to go into all of them in depth, but here’s a quick overview so know what is possible when using the six Cognitive [ more… ]