The Microsoft Challenge: Artificial Intelligence Reborn!
Microsoft is a major Pixels Camp sponsor and we’re delighted to announce they have an exciting challenge for all participants.
Besides helping out with infrastructure for the event (both our digital signage solution and the security CTF contest are run on Azure) and bringing us top-tier speakers like Chris Heilmann, Microsoft has taken up the challenge set by Bright Pixel and would like to challenge all Pixels Camp participants to explore the Microsoft Cognitive Service APIs and incorporate them in your projects.
How to Use the APIs
All major technology corporations are investing a lot on AI and Microsoft is one of the companies taking the lead on cognitive services, which is by far the most exciting field right now. And we all think it would be awesome to see AI-centric projects at Pixels Camp!
Most of the Cognitive Service APIs have a free usage tier, so all you really need to do is to log in here with a Microsoft/Live ID and you’ll have access to API keys, full SDK documentation and even an interactive API shell, complete with code snippets in many common programming languages.
The Challenge: Build the next generation AI
Let’s say you’ve always wanted to build an AI — the benevolent kind, of course. And now, finally, you can!
The APIs provided cover a huge set of functionality, from vision APIs that provide your project with the ability to describe and identify elements in complete scenes, to text APIs that are able to derive meaning from all forms of written text, as well as speech recognition (and synthesis) in multiple languages.
So even if you don’t want to built a standalone AI, You can still use them to enrich your applications and give them unique cognitive capabilities.
Or you can go the extra mile and couple them with the Bot Framework, to build your own personal assistant.
But regardless of what you decide to do, we hope that you’ll feel inspired by Chris’ talk and build your entire project around a conversational interface, making it more accessible to everyone.
Get into a DevOps workflow while you’re at it
Another thing that Microsoft provides is the ability to use Visual Studio Team Services — you might already know they have full Git support, but what you might not know is that they also provide a whole range of free tools to manage your DevOps workflow, no matter what OS you run or whatever language you develop in.
We can’t wait to see what you’ll create with these APIs and tools! And, of course, we’re happy to have folk from Microsoft around during the event to help you and answer any questions you may have.
