Rekha Kodali - Microsoft Azure AI: A Beginner’s Guide: Explore Azure Applied AI Services, Azure Cognitive Services and Azure Machine Learning with Practical Illustrations

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FIRST EDITION 2022

Copyright BPB Publications, India

ISBN: 978-93-55510-518

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As Senior Vice President Everything on Azure Solutions at Avanade Inc, I see Artificial Intelligence (AI) as the core pillar for Digital Transformation across all verticals and customer segments.

The concept of AI has fascinated a lot of free thinkers and frightened others. A few refer to AI as a great leap towards building future businesses, while some bashes the idea based on fears that might lead to human extinction.

While AI technologies are still far from creating a self-aware and self-evolving AI that might take over the earth, for a fact - AI already has a big impact on almost every facet of our lives. AI has given businesses across industries a chance to leverage it to build future products, services, optimize operations, and drive invaluable insights for improving Customer experience and Employee experience. Each year, new developments are being made with artificial intelligence and automation that businesses can use in various innovative ways. But guess what, the availability of AI Skilled Professionals is one biggest blocker in the accelerated adoption of AI.

What like about this book is that it provides practical guidelines for different personas right from CTO level to AI Architect or AI Consultant or a beginner AI Developer. This book makes it easy to learn Microsoft Azure AI concepts, common use cases, covers the basics and advanced concepts of Azure AI. The book is well structured and covers a vast number of Azure AI and PaaS capabilities. The best way to learn new technology is to try your hands on developing simple apps and writing the code. This book helps with addressing that aspect with well-explained working code samples.

I enjoyed the chapter covering the basics of the Azure AI platform, and concepts of the Azure AI ecosystem and services. This is a must-read book if you want to learn about Azure Cognitive Services, Azure Computer Vision, Azure Applied AI Services, and Azure Machine Learning with practical examples to build intelligent applications in the domain of Image Processing, Object Detection, Text Recognition, OCR, Spatial Analysis and Face Recognition.

Do not forget to test your knowledge against well-crafted Multiple-Choice questions at the end of each chapter. Nice to reinforce the learning objective.

Book also provides technical content and insights Azure Applied AI Services like Azure Form Recognizer, Azure Metrics Advisor, Azure Cognitive Search, Azure Immersive Reader, Azure Video Analyzer for Media, and Azure Bot Service.

Books do a great job in developing a good understanding of BoT development options, BOT Framework, how to leverage Bot Framework Emulator, NLP capabilities to enhance conversational interfaces.

From me bonus, part of the book is the concluding chapter, which covers concepts about infusing ML in Custom Applications using ML.NET.