Building Smart Apps /w Speech, NLP & Vision (Location: Microsoft Reactor @ GCT)

OVERVIEW

As a follow-up to last month's session on the Bot Framework, we'll take a closer look at how you can build mobile & web apps that take advantage of speech, natural language understanding and computer vision. We'll also a broader look at Microsoft Cognitive Services that can power all smart apps. This is a session for ALL developers, including Web, Windows, iOS, Android, .NET, Java and more.

See the full session abstract below.

EVENING DETAILS

6:00PM - PIZZA & NETWORKING: Doors open, head to the Microsoft Reactor on the 4th floor. Food & drinks will be served, courtesy of Microsoft. Take the opportunity to mingle with your fellow community developers.

6:30PM - INTRODUCTION: Housekeeping, open mic and other community announcements & request.

6:45PM - MAIN PRESENTATION: See abstract below.

After the talk - Prize raffle courtesy of Microsoft, and other sponsors (as available).

IMPORTANT: Your RSVP with full name is required to add your name to the building security guest list.

MAIN PRESENTATION

Building Smart Applications with Speech, Natural Language Processing & Vision

Your computer or phone have cameras, but can they understand what they see? Your computer can recognize your voice and detect words in a speech dictation, but can it truly understand the meaning of what you are saying? Can it analyze your intent and respond accordingly? You don’t need a PhD in artificial intelligence to integrate speech and natural language understanding in your projects. Microsoft Cognitive Services (aka “Project Oxford”) is a portfolio of cloud-based REST APIs and SDKs powered by Machine Learning which enable developers to write applications which understand the content within the rapidly growing set of multimedia data.

Cognitive Services API services will help you understand and interact with audio, text, image, and video. In this session, we’ll start with an overview of available services for speech recognition and speech synthesis. Then we’ll explore through live demos how to leverage the Language Understanding Intelligent Service which lets you determine intent, detect entities in user speech and improve language understanding models to more efficiently work with user data. Lastly, we’ll leverage Computer Vision APIs to detect human faces, analyze the content of images, and perform Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to detect and analyze words within a photo. Come learn how your apps can tap into the same active learning services behind the brain of Cortana, and get started writing smart applications that can understand what your users are saying.

ABOUT THE PRESENTER

Nick Landry – Senior Technical Evangelist, Microsoft

Nick Landry (@ActiveNick) is a mobility pioneer and former entrepreneur specializing in cross-platform mobile app development for Windows, iOS and Android devices. Nick works at Microsoft as a Senior Technical Evangelist in the New York Metro area. He spent most his career in IT consulting, software and services companies across various technical and business roles, designing, building, managing and selling innovative software products and solutions for the world’s top brands and Fortune 500 companies.

Known for his dynamic and engaging style, he is a frequent speaker at major software development conferences worldwide, was a 10-year Microsoft MVP awarded on Windows Phone Development, and a Nokia Developer Ambassador & Champion. With over 24 years of professional experience, Nick is a certified developer and software architect by trade and specializes in Cross-Platform Mobility, IoT, Cloud, GIS, Computer Speech and Mobile Game Development. He is an active blogger, occasional author, avid gamer, loving husband and proud father.

Blog: www.AgeofMobility.com (http://www.ageofmobility.com/)

GitHub: https://github.com/activenick

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/activenick