Microsoft Does Cognitive Too
April 8, 2016
I read “Microsoft Launches Cognitive Services Based on Project Oxford and Bing.” I immediately thought of MIcrosoft’s smart chatbot adventure. Do I doubt the efficacy of Microsoft’s smart systems? No, I just think that the same approach manifested in Tay probably exists in the suite of APIs announced on March 30, 2016.
I learned:
The brand name Cognitive Services is a nod to IBM’s Watson, which for the past few years has been marketed as a “cognitive computing” product — that is, one that’s based on the way the human brain works.
That is working out very well for IBM. There is a recipe book and many projects. Revenues? Well, sure. Some.
Microsoft offers a search API. That, one hopes, will actually work reasonably well. Microsoft’s track record in the information access department has been interesting.
According to this Microsoft page, there are give search APIs which are available for preview. Use is like a taxi ride, and that type of metered pricing is often unsettling.
The five APIs are:
- Bing Autosuggest
- Bing Image Search
- Bing News Search
- Bing Video Search
- Bing Web Search.
I assume one can mix in academic knowledge, entity linking, and knowledge exploration. In addition, it appears thate is a language understanding intelligent service called Luis. I noted linguistic analysis as an API as well. And for good measure, one can tap text analytics.
For a developer, these Lego blocks offer an opportunity to code up a solution.
On the other hand, there are goodies from outfits from Baidu to Facebook, from Google to X.ai from which to choose.
Just as IBM is saddled with the Jeopardy and recipe book, Microsoft is going to have to live with Tay’s capabilities.
What happens if Tay works into a routine search query? That will be intriguing. Perhaps Tay and Watson can get together and do smart thing?
Stephen E Arnold, April 8, 2016
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