Microsoft Adds More iO, Mixed Reality, and IoT Services to Its Azure Line



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Microsoft is sharing several Azure-specific ads a few days before the launch of its Build 2019 developer conference. Today's announcements are intended to highlight Microsoft's positioning on Azure in Microsoft. as the best cloud for artificial intelligence, mixed reality, advanced computing and blockchain, officials said.

Microsoft generally makes available the hardware acceleration models previously advertised and running on its on-premise (FPGA) on-premise gate matrices available in Azure. Microsoft BrainWave Project – its project to use FPGA to provide fast AI processing in Azure – seized preview.

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Last year, when it was created, Microsoft announced a preview of Azure Machine Learning hardware accelerated models powered by Project Brainwave in the cloud. This was the first step in providing external clients with Microsoft FPGA processing for AI workloads. Microsoft also unveiled a limited preview of Project Brainwave "on the board." The on-board devices, in this case, were on-premise servers that could act as Azure IoT Edge devices, Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise being the first partners from this Overview.

As part of its build announcements this year, Microsoft is also adding ONNX Runtime support for NVIDIA TensorRT and Intel nGraph for high-speed inference on NVIDIA and Intel processors.

Microsoft adds a new category of cognitive services called "Decision" to its stable AI application programming interfaces that developers can add to their applications. The Decision category includes the previously announced anomaly detector API; "Personalizer" (which seems to be a renowned version of Project Custom Decision's current cognitive service API); and moderator of content. These cognitive service APIs are all about making better decisions, officials said.

Microsoft also makes its cognitive search feature available to developers, which will allow developers to apply Cognitive Services algorithms to obtain new information from their structured and unstructured content. Microsoft is currently introducing a new feature that will allow developers to store cognitive search information to create engaging experiences using Power BI visualizations or machine learning models. New public overview of a cognitive service Ink Recognizer for the integration of digital ink recognition; Form Recognizer to automate data entry; and a conversational transcription capability in Speech Service for the transcription of real-time conversations are also on the agenda.

About Machine Learning, Microsoft is adding new features to its Azure Machine Learning service to help developers more easily create high quality templates and adopt a codeless approach to creating and deploying templates at the same time. helps a new visual interface of machine learning.

In the mixed reality space, Microsoft will make available a development edition of HoloLens 2 from $ 3,500, or $ 99 per month, subscription. (Microsoft has not revealed any availability dates for the HoloLens development edition.) As part of this package, developers are getting a HoloLens 2 device, Azure credits of $ 500 and mixed reality services connected to Azure. And in the wake of Epic Chief's commitment, Tim Sweeney, to support HoloLens 2, Epic's Unreal Engine 4 will support the streaming and integration of a native platform for HoloLens 2 from here the end of May.

In the IoT / Smart Edge domain, Microsoft introduces a new variant of its Azure SQL database called Azure SQL Database Edge, which will run on peripherals subject to compute constraints at the edge. This new database shares the same main programming environment with Azure SQL Database and SQL Server, Microsoft said. Azure SQL Database Edge includes support for ARM and x64 devices and gateways, peripheral devices connected to the cloud, and completely offline, Microsoft officials said. Developers can request access to the Early Adopter program to gain access to the preview.

Microsoft is also publishing IoT Plug and Play, which managers are calling a new open modeling language for a more seamless connection of IoT devices to the cloud. (The program appears to be inspired by Microsoft's Plug-and-Play PC Device Program.) (Later, through IoT Plug and Play, Microsoft will offer users a choice of partner-certified devices.

Microsoft has been working on its blockchain offerings as a service since 2015. Last year, Microsoft announced Azure Blockchain Workbench, which allowed developers to model blockchain applications on a preconfigured network supported by Azure. Microsoft now provides what it calls its Azure Blockchain service as a publicly available preview. The service provides for the creation, management and governance of the consortium's blockchain networks.

In collaboration with J.P. Morgan, Microsoft makes Quorum available as the first book of its Blockchain service. Quorum is built on the Ethereum protocol. Microsoft is also expanding its VS Code lightweight development environment for creating and building Ethereum smart contacts.

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