Language API from Project Oxford in Public Beta -- Visual Studio Magazine

Language API from Project Oxford in Public Beta

Microsoft has offered a few of the machine learning APIs to developers to incorporate into apps. Out in public beta now is LUIS, the Language Understanding Intelligent Service that now has Chinese language support and adds dozens of prebuilt models.

By Michael Domingo
10/28/2015

Microsoft's Machine Learning team has released beta versions of a handful of machine learning-based APIs that developers can use to add vision, speech, facial recognition, and language translation to apps. The output is a result of the work Microsoft has been putting forth in its Project Oxford initiative that the company demonstrated at this year's Build Conference in April.

"We've further expanded the reach of Project Oxford's Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS) with public beta availability, Chinese language support and more pre-built models," wrote Ryan Galgon, Senior Program Manager in Microsoft's Technology & Research group, in a blog post. "In addition, beta versions of the Project Oxford face, computer vision and speech SDKs are now available on GitHub."

Chinese language support is the main addition to LUIS, a feature that Galgon said was highly requested by users. "LUIS correctly processes Chinese utterances that include fragments of English." Data collected by LUIS can also be readily exported to a JSON object, and those objects can be imported to new apps. Microsoft has dogfooded LUIS, as it's the API that processes language in Microsoft's Gigjam, the cross-platform business collaboration apps that has Cortana at its core.

Besides LUIS, the Machine Learning team is also making face, computer vision, and speech SDKs available on Github. Learn more about the Project Oxford SDKs and APIs at https://www.projectoxford.ai/sdk.

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You Tell 'Em, Readers: If you've read this far, know that Michael Domingo, Visual Studio Magazine Editor in Chief, is here to serve you, dear readers, and wants to get you the information you so richly deserve. What news, content, topics, issues do you want to see covered in Visual Studio Magazine? He's listening at [email protected].

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