“Artificial intelligence productivity for every developer and every scenario” - this is the slogan which is shown on the landing page of the Microsoft AI Platform . But many people don’t know which services are included in this broad AI ecosystem. It is not only about Bots or Machine Learning - it’s about much more like Cognitive Services, it’s about the tools used for developing AI apps and the frameworks underneath all those great and intelligent services.

Yesterday I wanted to deploy a new bot with the Azure Bot Service to start developing a new digital assistant within the Azure Bot Framework platform. But as I created my bot from the Azure portal I ran into a strange error upon testing the bot immediately, which you can see below: As you can see the bot’s function started, but it didn’t finish successfully and in the test window I got the error message “couldn’t send retry” which was quite strange as I didn’t modify the code at all.

Microsoft’s Bot Framework is a great platform for designing, developing and deploying bots for various use cases. As nowadays many people are familiar with bots and they get used to connect and communicate with bots via social media, it’s a good opportunity to bring a service to the next level by adding a bot to it for a better communication service. In the past, t was very hard to achieve that as you would basically have to develop the bot on your own and connect all the different systems and platforms together to make the bot available to a broader audience.

One of the coolest Cognitive Services APIs is finally generally available: the Text Analytics API. If you have a look at **Survey 365 **you will see what awesome stuff the Text Analytics API lets you do. Like in this example, you can extract text and detect the sentiment score of a given text to see if it is rather positive or negative. And all that without coding a lot. You can see the official announcement from the Microsoft Azure team about the GA information below:

During the work on my first infographic on Cognitive Services I had a hard time to get the right icons for all Cognitive Services and APIs as I used Visio to create it and there were no stencils for these services. So I decided to go with the icons, Sandro Pereira created, which are totally awesome, but unfortunately, there are some service icons missing. So I had to create the missing icons on my own in Visio, which resulted in a huge amount of working hours to get this done.

As the Microsoft Ignite is currently going on in Orlando, there are a lot of news and updates on all the various areas. The main focus areas which have been presented in the keynote are: Modern workplace Business applications Applications & infrastructure Data & AI As you might already know I’m into all things AI, which is why I want to share the most recent and important updates on the AI ecosystem (Cognitive Services, Bots & ML) by Microsoft during the Ignite with you…