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How Machine Learning Ate Microsoft

Posted by samzenpus on from the doing-it-smarter dept.

snydeq writes Yesterday's announcement of Azure Machine Learning offers the latest sign of Microsoft's deep machine learning expertise — now available to developers everywhere, InfoWorld reports. "Machine learning has infiltrated Microsoft products from Bing to Office to Windows 8 to Xbox games. Its flashiest vehicle may be the futuristic Skype Translator, which handles two-way voice conversations in different languages. Now, with machine learning available on the Azure cloud, developers can build learning capabilities into their own applications: recommendations, sentiment analysis, fraud detection, fault prediction, and more. The idea of the new Azure offering is to democratize machine learning, so you no longer need to hire someone with a doctorate to use a machine learning algorithm."

2 of 96 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Call me paraniod, but ... by Lennie · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Let me be clear: what applies to Azure as a foreigner applies also to Amazon/AWS, Google, Rackspace, IBM/SoftLayer, CenturyLink, DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, PeerOne or any other US-based company (even if they run the service in Europe for example).

    But I noticed there are others in the world, for example on the OpenStack Marketplace:
    http://www.openstack.org/marke...

    --
    New things are always on the horizon
  2. Re:How Bing learns by Marginal+Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Although the above was just a joke, I actually clicked on the link after I submitted it, and it turns out to be an old page from 2009. It provides the follows searches which it says "just don't work" on Bing (in 2009):

    “Was Einstein married?”
    “What did Benjamin Franklin invent?”
    “What is the top selling album of all time?”

    I did a quick comparison of those three between Bing and Google, and the results seemed pretty comparable. In fact, I thought Bing did a little better on the first two, and Google did a little better on the last one - primarily because it provided a nice blurb from Wikipedia in the results.

    So, although I think we can all agree that Bing was "horrible" in the past, it's come a long ways. It's not like in the old days when Google was clearly the best - I think you could use any of the major search engines now and do just fine.