Microsoft is introducing new artificial intelligence capabilities for developers on the company’s Azure cloud platform. An enhancement to Azure Cognitive Services, called “Decision,” provides user-specific recommendations for better decision-making.
Azure Cognitive Services is a collection of APIs to intelligent algorithms that developers can tap to perform image recognition, speech recognition, natural language processing, anomaly detection, and other intelligent tasks. Decision adds a service called Personalizer, which leverages reinforcement learning to offer users specific recommendations to assist with decisions.
Azure Search also gaining AI capabilities, via a cognitive search capability that uses Cognitive Services algorithms to extract insights from structured and unstructured content. In addition, Microsoft is previewing a capability that allows developers to store AI insights gained from cognitive search.
In other developments pertaining to AI capabilities on Azure:
- Azure Machine Learning improvements intended to simplify building and deploying machine learning models, including MLOps capabilities with Azure DevOps integration. This provides developers with automation of the machine learning lifecycle.
- Automated ML advancements and a UI to develop models.
- A visual machine learning interface with no-code model creation and deployment with drag-and-drop functionality.
- Hardware-accelerated models for low-latency inferencing on FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays).
- Support for the ONNX Runtime on the Nvidia TensorRT deep learning inference platform and on the Intel nGraph deep learning compiler. This support will provide high-speed inferencing on Nvidia and Intel chipsets.
