Azure Cognitive Services

Abstract

Bots can be broadly divided into two categories: chat bots and smart bots. Chat bots respond using a predefined set of rules and hence the responses are limited. For example, if you build a bot for reserving a table in a restaurant, the bot would always ask the basic questions of date and time, number of people, and seating preference (indoor/outdoor). If you throw a random request at the chat bot, it might not respond with a meaningful message or might just respond with a generic message. Smart bots are more intelligent. They work with a wide variety of information and generate more human-like responses. Smart bots are designed to learn from the conversation and provide more-useful answers as the conversation progresses, leaving the impression of a human-to-human conversation. Bots can be designed to create smarter responses by using cutting-edge artificial intelligence algorithms. Authoring AI algorithms is a complex task, requiring a varied skill set and lots of analysis to build an AI algorithm that can perform tasks like natural language processing and sentiment analysis or generate recommendations. Microsoft Cognitive Services provides a basket of AI algorithms that can be integrated into any application. These algorithms were developed by an expert team and cater across the fields of computer vision, speech, text analysis, natural language processing, knowledge extraction, and web search. In this chapter, we will learn to build smarter bots using Microsoft Cognitive Services and come to understand the capabilities of the evolving list of powerful AI algorithms.