All Things Microsoft AI

User Groups May 4: “Machine Learning in .Net” ( https://www.meetup.com/Roanoke-Valley-NET-User-Group/events/285301621/ ) May 11: Azure Cleveland ( https://www.meetup.com/Azure-Cleveland-Meetup/ ) May 19: GLUG.Net ( https://www.meetup.com/GLUGnet/events/ ) May 26: Cleveland C#/VB.Net User Group ( https://www.meetup.com/Cleveland-C-VB-Net-User-Group )   Conferences May 5-7: Global Azure 2022 ( https://globalazure.net / )  May 6: StirTrek ( https://stirtrek.com / )  

Virtual User Group Meetings for Mar/Apr ‘22   Mar 24: “Predicting Flights with Azure Databricks” - https://www.meetup.com/NWVDNUG/events/284074689/ Mar 29: “Machine Learning in .Net” - https://www.meetup.com/Edmonton-NET-User-Group/events/284389088/ Apr 4: Ohio North Database Training- https://www.meetup.com/ohio-north-database-training/events/ Apr 13: Azure Cleveland - https://www.meetup.com/Azure-Cleveland-Meetup/ Apr 21: GLUG.Net - https://www.meetup.com/GLUGnet/events/ Apr 28: Cleveland C#/VB.Net User Group - https://www.meetup.com/Cleveland-C-VB-Net-User-Group  

Virtual User Group Meetings Mar 1: Ohio North Database Training ( https://www.meetup.com/ohio-north-database-training/events/ )  Mar 9: Azure Cleveland ( https://www.meetup.com/Azure-Cleveland-Meetup/ ) Mar 17: GLUG.Net ( https://www.meetup.com/GLUGnet/events/ ) Mar 24: Cleveland C#/VB.Net User Group ( https://www.meetup.com/Cleveland-C-VB-Net-User-Group )  

Microsoft’s Azure offers a great deal of features and capabilities.  One of them is Cognitive Services, where users can access a variety of APIs to help mimic a human response.  Some features include converting text to spoken speech, speech to text, and even the equivalent human understanding of a spoken phrase.  These services are divided into 4 major categories, as seen below.  Please note “Computer Vision” and “Custom Vision” sound very similar but their capabilities are different, as outlined in the “Vision” section below.   Decision Anomaly Detector: Identify potential problems in time series data. Content Moderator: Detect potentially offensive or unwanted content. Personalizer: Create rich, personalized experiences for every user.   Language LUIS (Language Understanding Intelligent Service) QnA Maker: Create a conversational question and answer layer over your data. Text Anal...

Overview Speech-to-text is one of the many cognitive services offered by Azure.  All Azure cognitive services can be classified into one of four primary categories: Decision Language Speech Vision Each category contains a variety of services, with Speech-to-text categorized in the “Speech” category.  It converts spoken language to text using either an SDK or web API call.  Both methods will require a subscription key, obtained by a brief resource setup in the Azure portal.  Speech-to-text can be configured to recognize a variety of languages as displayed at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/speech-service/language-support . In addition, the source of the speech could be either live spoken words, or a recording.   How to Use Speech-to-text Project Setup (using SDK) Setup the Speech-to-text resource in Azure.  Simply specify “speech services” in the search bar, and all speech resources in Azure marketplace wi...

Recently Vinod Kurpad delivered a presentation on using AI to build document processing workflows.  The presentation s lides can be found at  https://on24static.akamaized.net/event/34/60/86/0/rt/1/documents/resourceList1636579433122/useaitobuilddocumentprocessingworkflows1636579401517.pdf   By using AI, several boxed fields (i.e. SSN) on a forma can be treated as 1 field.  It allows dynamic entities, like tables, to recognize multiple rows in a single table with various column types.   Listed below are questions and answers discussed during the presentation:   Could the Form Recognizer be used in Power Apps for receipt processing? Instead of using the AI Builder SKU that comes with Power Apps at an additional licensing cost Form Recognizer is available in Power Apps and has a receipt processing app in Power Apps. Licensing model in this scenario is via Power Apps.  https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/process-receipts-with-a...

On October 28, 2021, Jeff Fritz (Microsoft) presented “What’s new in .Net 6” to the Cleveland C#/VB.Net User Group .  A recording of that presentation is now available here on my YouTube Channel . Listed below is a brief summary of the key points from that presentation.   C#10 Program.cs and startup.cs are the starting point files for all .Net applications Program.cs no longer needs namespace and ‘Program’ class declaration.  All of that is now implied Read-only records can now be created in C#. “global using whatsNewinCSharp10;” can be specified in 1 file and it will apply to entire application <ImplicitUsings>enable in ,CSPROJ will bring in namespaces need for the project’ Generated global using statements will be inserted in *.g.cs ‘namespace whatsNewinCSharp10;’ without {} can be used at the top of the file String interpolation is now available in constants (public const string m...