Microsoft unveils new AI development tools at its Connect(); conference

Microsoft Corp. today kicked off Connect(); 2017, its annual developer conference in New York, with the introduction of several new tools designed to help companies build artificial intelligence applications and other modern software.

The first additions are rolling out for Visual Studio, the company’s popular coding platform. Chief among them is a package called Visual Studio Tools for AI that lets developers quickly get started with a new project using their machine learning engine of choice. The bundle supports Microsoft’s CNTK framework, as well as popular outside alternatives such as the Google Inc.-created TensorFlow.

Once a machine learning model is ready, Visual Studio Tools for AI can be used to ship off the code to Azure Batch AI. It’s a service within Microsoft’s public cloud that provides a convenient environment for training machine learning models.

Specifically, the offering enables developers to have their AI applications practice on sample data until they become accurate enough for real-world use. At that point, a team can employ one of the new deployment tools that Microsoft is launching alongside the machine learning package to roll out the model to the target platform.

A company building an AI-powered mobile app, for example, would use AI Toolkit for Azure IoT Edge. The framework allows for models to be deployed to connected devices by way of Microsoft’s public cloud. Another new framework in turn lets companies run AI software directly inside their Azure SQL Database deployments.

Microsoft debuted the artificial intelligence tools alongside a number of more general-purpose products that should appeal to even more developers. Most notably, the company has unveiled a managed version of the popular MariaDB database and Azure Databricks, a new service based on the popular Apache Spark analytics engine. It’s the fruit of a yearlong collaboration with Databricks Inc., the recently funded startup that was founded by project’s creators to commercialize their work.

Back in Visual Studio, a new tool called Live Share aims to ease collaboration for development teams. Microsoft says that the capability will enable multiple programmers to edit and debug code in a single view a la Google Docs.

The company has also announced several smaller enhancements across its development and cloud portfolios that are being spotlighted at Connect(); as well. A complete list of the features unveiled at the event so far can be found here.

Source: Siliconangle