Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as one of the most disruptive forces behind the digital transformation of business. At Microsoft, we believe everyone—developers, data scientists and enterprises—should have access to the benefits of AI to augment human ingenuity in unique and differentiated ways. We’ve been conducting research in AIfor more than two decades and infusing it into our products and services. Now we’re bringing it to everyone through simple, yet powerful tools. One of those tools is Microsoft Cognitive Services, a collection of cloud-hosted APIs that let developers easily add AI capabilities for vision, speech, language, knowledge and search into applications, across devices and platforms such as iOS, Android and Windows.
To date more than a million developers have already discovered and tried our Cognitive Services, and many new customers are harnessing the power of AI, such as major auto insurance provider Progressive best known for Flo, its iconic spokesperson. The company wanted to take advantage of customers’ increasing use of mobile channels to interact with its brand. Progressive used Microsoft Azure Bot Service and Cognitive Services to quickly and easily build the Flo Chatbot—currently available on Facebook Messenger—which answers customer questions, provides quotes and even offers a bit of witty banter in Flo’s well-known style.
Today, we’re announcing new milestones for Cognitive Services vision and search services in Azure. Read about it in the Azure blog.