This blog is co-authored by Wee Hyong Tok, Principal Data Scientist Manager, Office of the CTO AI.

In recent years, we have seen a leap in practical AI innovations catalyzed by vast amounts of data, the cloud, innovations in algorithms, hardware, and more. So how do developers begin to design AI applications that engage and delight your customers, optimize operations, empower your employees, and transform products?

Using Azure Cognitive Services you can now infuse your applications, websites, and bots with intelligent capabilities. These capabilities build on years of research done on vision, speech, knowledge, search, and language. Using different cognitive services, developers can now easily add AI capabilities without training the machine learning models from scratch.

O’Reilly and Microsoft are excited to bring you a free e-book on AI, titled A Developer’s Guide to Building AI Applications. In this e-book, Anand Raman and Wee Hyong Tok of Microsoft provide a gentle introduction to use Azure AI for building intelligent, AI applications. They provide a practical example of a bot called “Conference Buddy”, that is used by conference attendees. The e-book walks through the use case, the architecture, and how to create the bot while infusing it with AI. The code is made available on GitHub. Specifically, the e-book will help you:

• Gain an in-depth understanding of the tools, infrastructure, and services that are available on the Azure AI platform.
• Get started with developing an Intelligent Chatbot, with plug and play intelligence that enriches your bot to support engaging experiences.
• Learn about the resources available on AI.

Get started today!

• Download A Developer’s Guide to Building AI Applications.
• Learn more about Azure AI.
• Try Cognitive Services APIs for free.
• Create your Azure free account.
• Watch the Ignite 2018 AI sessions.