Microsoft brings its flavor of AI with Microsoft Cognitive Services

As major vendors look for ways to differentiate in the cloud, application development and artificial intelligence are two key tools in their arsenal.

Salesforce has long cultivated its Lightning development platform, and recently released Einstein, its artificial intelligence application. At Amazon re:Invent in November, the cloud provider announced a series of artificial intelligence (AI)-powered APIs for voice, text and video.

These announcements came on the heels of yet another flavor of AI, Microsoft Cognitive Services, which was released in March. The series of more than 20 APIs enlist AI for video, audio, text and more. SharePoint and BI expert Scott Robinson joined Search Content Management for a podcast on the importance of these services for users.

"They are Microsoft's way to capitalize on capabilities they have already built into their cloud environment," Robinson says. "They decided to make APIs available to the user base so they can create apps. [Microsoft Cognitive Services APIs include] face recognition, object recognition, face identification, OCR [optical character recognition], speech recognition, text [analysis] and sentiment analysis. All are based on a machine learning component, so you have AI you can build into any application."

Robinson says there are many different directions to go in, given the variation and volume of APIs. Two of the greatest benefits of these APIs, according to Robinson, are improvements to customer experience and bringing heft to processes like social media monitoring, which scours the web for comments that may be favorable or unfavorable to a company.

"People want to improve relationships with customers," Robinson says. "This is a big part of social media monitoring, and it cranks up the authenticity, veracity of social media monitoring by an order of magnitude."

Some experts have indicated that voice is the form factor of AI for the future, and Robinson agrees.

"Voice is prime-time ready; video is not," he says. "It's one thing to analyze a face. It's another to pull up a video square dance and analyze the video for information. We're moving more toward hands-free interaction."

Odyssey of Installing Windows Phone SDK 7.1 in Windows XP

You decided to develop a Windows Phone Application, you thought that Windows Phone 8 SDK is a good opportunity to start with as Microsoft represents it as something awesome and you think that Microsoft should have covered the gap between Windows Phone 7 and Android or iOS.

You visit http://download.microsoft.com/ but Windows Phone 8 SDK is not there, but you are a newbie in Windows Phone development so you download Windows Phone 7.1 SDK in order to start....your enthusiasm does not let you to read the requirements and you have Windows Phone 7.1 SDK and a laptop with Windows XP SP3 and Visual Studio 2010...damn you should have read the Release Notes. Windows XP is not compatible with Windows Phone 7.1 SDK.

"Windows 7 or Windows Vista is required" but if you want to be nerd this cannot stop you.
You start searching and some workarounds will appear.  You can follow the steps below:

1. Download the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP Refresh
2. Extract the contents of the setup package by running vm_web.exe /x and choosing a path to extract to
3. Go to the folder you extracted to in step 2 and open the file baseline.dat in notepad
4. Look for the section named [gencomp7788]
5. Change the value InstallOnLHS from 1 to 0
6. Change the value InstallOnWinXP from 1 to 0
7. Save and close baseline.dat
8. Run setup.exe /web from the folder you extracted to in step 2

You follow the wizard and you have the SDK installed on your Windows XP computer.
After the installation you need to update to 7.1.1 (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=29233).

The Windows Phone Developer Tools includes the following

• Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone
• Windows Phone Emulator Resources
• Silverlight 4 Tools For Visual Studio
• XNA Game Studio 4.0
• Microsoft Expression Blend for Windows Phone 

Full of joy and pride that you achieved to install it you open Visual Studio, you create a blank Silverlight application and you press F5...in order to see the emulator...You cannot connect to the emulator...The following error occurs:

"The delay loading of ... or this DLL was missing an ordinal. Execution cannot continue."

This issue is due to a missing DLL called bcrypt.dll. This DLL is only included in Windows since Windows Vista. You can't copy it to your Windows XP from a Windows Vista installation, the DLL depends on new functionalities provided by ksecdd.sys. The hack consists of emulating the bcrypt functions needed by xde.exe.

Fortunately, XDA Developers Forum has the solution as you can see below:

http://forum.xda-developers.com/wiki/Windows_Phone_7_Emulator

This was the last step of the installation, restart your PC and you are ready, Happy Coding.