Ahead of Build 2018, Microsoft is launching a couple of new artificial intelligence service for developers on Azure. The company is adding a new AI-powered service part of its Cognitive Services toolkit for developers that enables them to add intelligent features to their applications without going through the trouble of building and training complex neural network models.

The new service, Custom Vision, enables developers to train Microsoft’s vision AI with their own custom data set on Azure. Developers can train the vision algorithms with their own data set, and then export the data for use directly on their applications, without needing to actually connect with Microsoft’s cloud.

Additionally, Microsoft is advancing its Face API with significantly improved scalability today. The company says its Face API is now capable of supporting up to 1 million unique faces, letting developers recognize faces within pictures with incredibly fast response rates. Redmond is also launching its Bing Entity Search–a service that lets developers get data about key entities from the interwebs with the power of Bing and a simple REST API–in general availability today.

Microsoft will likely reveal more updates to its artificial intelligence services and the tool it provides developers with for AI at Build 2018 in May. Like the recent years, the company will have a big focus on AI and “intelligent edge” at the conference, where it will probably announce updates to Cognitive Services and other AI services on Azure.

Tagged with Azure, Cognitive Services, Microsoft AI