UPDATED 08:48 EDT / MAY 11 2017

EMERGING TECH

Microsoft adds new APIs to its growing Cognitive Services lineup

Microsoft Corp. added to its growing collection of Cognitive Services with the launch of several new application programming interfaces at its Build 2017 conference Wednesday.

The company said developers can use the new APIs alongside the tools they’re already familiar with to build new artificial intelligence-powered apps quickly and easily, with customization. Microsoft said it already counts 568,000 developers in 60 countries who are using its Cognitive Services, which now number 29 APIs in total.

The new APIs are Bing Custom Search, Custom Vision Service and Custom Decision Service. These can be used alongside the existing Custom Speech and Language Understanding Intelligent Service APIs to bring data to Microsoft algorithms and create services tailored to developers’ specific needs, the company said.

In addition, Microsoft also announced the preview of another new API, Video Indexer, which enables tagging, indexing, object recognition and sentiment analysis in video content. And the company announced the debut of Cognitive Services Labs, which are incubators for users to test out new cognitive services before they’re released as previews.

One of these experimental new services is called Project Prague, which Microsoft described as a gesture-control API. Project Johannesburg is an API that enables route logistics calculation in maps, while Project Nanjing is an API used for calculating time and distance based recommendations for enterprise route optimization.

Other experimental APIs include Project Cuzco, which can be used to find events associated with entries in Wikipedia, and Project Wollongong, designed to evaluate the proximity of various amenities to different geographical locations.

Microsoft’s Cognitive Services are designed to work with the Microsoft Bot Framework, and the company says they can prove useful for developers building chat bots, as well as bots based on vision.

Image: efes/pixabay

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