This week's Microsoft Ignite brought news of Visual Studio Code Tool for AI and news of two updates to Microsoft Cognitive Services. 

Although its announcement came in the same blog post as the Azure Machine Learning Enhancements that we've already reported on, the Visual Studio Code Tools for AI extension was in fact launched earlier in September as a way for developers to build, test, and deploy Deep Learning and AI solutions. Its integration with Azure Machine Learning provides a run history view, detailing the performance of previous trainings and custom metrics. It integrates with the AML Experimentation service for executing jobs locally and in the cloud, and with the AML Model Management service for model deployment.

Visual Studio Code Tools for AI is a cross-platform extension that supports deep learning frameworks including Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (CNTK), Google TensorFlow, Theano, Keras, Caffe2 and more. Additional frameworks can be used via the open architecture. It supports Python, C/C++/C#, and supplies additional support for Cognitive Toolkit BrainScript. It provides an explorer for compute targets, which enables you to submit jobs to train models on remote environments like Azure Virtual Machines or Linux servers with GPU.

Being integrated with Azure Machine Learning makes it easy to browse through a gallery of sample experiments using CNTK, TensorFlow, MMLSpark and more:

News came of updates to Microsoft Cognitive Services, the cloud hosted APIs that Microsoft has made available for developers to easily incorporate AI into apps and applications on Android, iOS and Windows. The Text Analytics cognitive service which includes API functions such as language detection, key phrase extraction and sentiment analysis has now reached general availability.

Bing Custom Search will become generally available in October. This service lets developers design and deploy custom web search applications without a line of code – just specify the slices of the web that you want to draw from, or let cutting-edge AI technology help you to identify that subset. This technology empowers businesses of any size, right from small entrepreneurs to large organizations, to design and deploy custom web search applications. 

More Information

Announcing tools for the AI-driven digital transformation

Visual Studio Code Tools for AI

Related Articles

Azure Machine Learning Enhancements

Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit Version 2.0

Microsoft Expands Cognitive Services APIs

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