Building intelligent apps in C# with Azure’s AI as a Service offering — I should start this article with a disclaimer: I have not turned my dog into a cyborg, nor do I have any plans to do so. Instead, this article is the written form of a conference and user group talk I came up with awhile back while thinking “What is…

Understanding Conversational AI Systems without a PHD — Chatbots like Alexa and Siri are not magic, nor are they powered by a human-like supercomputer in a research lab. Instead, conversational AI uses a series of clever algorithms to understand, process, and respond intelligently to user commands. In this article we’ll take a look at the high-level parts that…

High-performance string comparison in one line of C# code — Tpyos happen. Users are nearly guaranteed to make small mistakes or type something very close to what you were expecting, but not exactly correct. When working in natural language processing (NLP) applications such as chatbots or text-based games, being able to cope with small differences in user input is critical…

Give voice to your applications with a few lines of C# code — Text to speech, or speech synthesis, lets a computer “speak” to the user using its speakers. Specifically, text to speech takes a string of text and converts it to an audio waveform that can then be played or saved to disk for later playback. In this article we’ll see how…

The best ways of studying to pass the Azure AI-102 Exam — Last week I sat down in my guest room for a remote proctored exam covering artificial intelligence on Microsoft Azure. I’d been studying Azure Cognitive Services, conversational AI, and Azure Cognitive Search and even writing and speaking about the things I explored. I assumed I was ready to take and…

Easy and affordable Speech Recognition on demand — Speech to text (also called speech recognition) extracts plain text strings from audio files or microphones. Azure’s speech to text offering is part of Azure Cognitive Services and lets developers convert audio to strings at an affordable pay-per-use pricing model. This allows developers to build intelligent apps that users can…

Flag and redact personally identifiable information with AI — PII identification, short for personally identifiable information, is a part of Azure Cognitive Services that lets us automatically flag potentially sensitive content in strings. In this article we’ll discuss how to get started with PII Identification, how to detect PII in strings using C#, and how to redact those strings…

Intelligent Analysis of Images using Pre-Trained Image Models — Computer Vision is part of Microsoft Azure’s Cognitive Services suite of artificial intelligence capabilities. With computer vision you can take advantage of pre-trained computer vision models to analyze your own images and get a wealth of information about them. In this article we’ll cover how to get started with Azure…

Building intelligent apps by adding context to text — Entity recognition is a powerful way to analyze blocks of text and highlight key people, locations, or topics of interest from that sentence for an artificial intelligence application to respond to. Azure Cognitive Services gives us standard entity recognition and linked entity recognition where we can get links to well-known…