Announced at //Build 2016, Microsoft Cognitive Services is a new collection of intelligence and knowledge APIs that enable developers to make their applications more intelligent, engaging and discoverable. It includes intelligent APIs from Bing, the former Project Oxford, and more, that allow systems to see, hear, speak, understand and interpret our needs using natural methods of communication, and knowledge APIs that bring the power of the web to developers.

With Cognitive Services, developers can easily add intelligent features – such as emotion and sentiment detection, vision and speech recognition, knowledge, search and language understanding – into their applications. The collection will continuously improve, adding new APIs and updating existing ones. Today we are announcing:

• Computer Vision API has expanded to more than  2,000 image categories and now includes natural language captions for images;
• Microsoft Translator API now includes speech translation;
• Emotion API now can detect emotions in videos, as well as static images;
• Language Understanding Intelligent Service now supports three additional languages (Spanish, Italian and French) and hierarchical entity detection;
• New versions of the Bing Search, Bing Image Search, Bing Video Search and Bing News Search APIs;
• New and updated APIs including Bing Auto Suggest, Spell Check, Knowledge Exploration Service, Entity Linking API and Linguistic Analysis API.