Microsoft Cognitive Services are APIs and services which can be used to add intelligent services to applications for different purposes, whether this is a web, mobile or desktop app or a bot which should interact with humans in a more natural way. But as there is a wide range of Cognitive Services which can be used this post should expose and describe each of the APIs currently available. This should help get to know Microsoft’s AI ecosystem a bit more.

Smart homes, smart vehicles, smart everything - nowadays all devices which we daily use have to be smart otherwise we wouldn’t use them, would we? There are so many different approaches to make a device smart either you can control it remotely, speak to it or it even sets actions autonomously which should ease our lifes here and there. The key to achieve all this is nearly the same everywhere, no matter if you use smart devices and services provided by Google, Amazon or Microsoft.

Microsoft Forms is one of the youngest services in the Office 365 ecosystem. Forms is a great service in my opinion as such a service was missing in the Microsoft repertoire. Now Office 365 users can create their Forms within seconds in order to create a survey or quiz and ask others about their opinion. And one of the most used survey topics in a company is the wellbeing of the employees.

Many of my customers, where I had the chance to do a workshop about Azure or Office 365 asked me the same question every single time: “How do you keep track with the updates on the roadmap?” I have to admit, the question is eligible due to the fact, that there is an update on the roadmap for both products nearly every day. So as a good consultant, you would need to spend all of your time studying the roadmaps to be on track and give your customers the newest information and advices in order to sell the best services and solutions.

The last days I was doing a lot of researches on AI and Cogntive Services as this topic is a major topic for the future in the daily use. So I read a couple of blog posts about this and got an idea on how to use it. And today I want to show you a small prototype application which I created in order to combine the Azure Cognitive Service API with my most used tool for work, which is Outlook and packed it into an Azure Logic App as I am not a developer (as you might know by now) in order to save development effort.

As you may know, Microsoft has released a Framework for building Bots on an Azure. You may encounter the problem that you are thrilled to start building a bot, but you don’t know how to begin and where to find the resources. So I thought of providing you with a list of useful resources and links on the Bot Framework which you may want to conduct: Links Official Microsoft Bot Framework Blog Bot Framework - Making Bots More Intelligent Forwarding activities / messages to other dialogs in Microsoft Bot Framework New Bot Framework features and updates Bots are banging: Getting Started with the Microsoft Bot Framework & Node.