SmartHub Integration – Microsoft Cognitive Services

Microsoft’s AI initiative is built on breakthrough advances in AI research and the computing power of the Microsoft cloud.  The Microsoft vision of “Conversations as a Platform” has been driving new capabilities in natural language processing, machine learning, and cognitive computing. Microsoft’s digital assistant, Cortana (used by over 150 million people) and the Microsoft Bot Framework are perhaps the best known parts of the initiative.  Microsoft is putting AI into existing products, rapidly expanding their machine learning and cognitive services offerings and investing heavily in basic research and venture investments in AI.

BA Insight has been a close Microsoft partner for over 12 years, so it has been natural to apply our best-of-breed approach and harness Microsoft’s AI capabilities to create intelligent search.

We do this in two ways:

1. Where Microsoft has infused intelligence into their products, such as Office 365 and Dynamics 365, we supplement this with content and signals from many different systems outside of the Microsoft stack. Read a case study about how BA Insight improves the Microsoft Graph.
2. We use the Microsoft Azure platform, in particular Microsoft Cognitive Services, Azure Machine Learning, and the Bot Framework, to quickly integrate the best machine learning, NLP, and cognitive services into our intelligent search offering. Our modular approach has always allowed our customers to rapidly assemble powerful search solutions. We are now able to provide dramatically better search by leveraging Microsoft’s Machine Learning and Microsoft Cognitive Services, specifically the Vision, Speech, Language, and Knowledge APIs.

Better Search – using machine learning and cognitive APIs we can enhance familiar search capabilities including:

• Semantic Data Enrichment:  Information is much more powerful when it is cross-related and there is a wealth of linked and semantic data that can be used to make much more powerful search and discovery experiences
• Relevance is improved by using machine learning to adjust based on successful searches, personal preferences, and other data collected via our SmartHub Analytics product
• Recommendations: personalized search, recommendations, suggestions, and adaptive UIs are all made possible by using advanced machine learning

New Types of Search and Discovery – by using AI we can provide completely new types of interactions with your data, such as:

• Multi-media search:  image, speech, and video understanding has also made huge advances due to Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. There is a lot of image and video content inside organizations that has traditionally been out of range for search.
• Multi-lingual search using machine translation: Microsoft has made huge advances in this area, and machine translation is opening a much wider audience for content and collaboration.
• Spoken Language search provides a more natural, interactive user experience.  It also allows hands-free interactions – from mobile phones, in laboratory and factory environments, and in augmented reality applications.
• Search Bots provide information in chat, email, and social media applications including Teams, Yammer, and Skype.

We have already built a number of these capabilities into our products and are actively building out more of them.

Contact us today to learn more.