This week’s Azure Every Day posts are focused on the different APIs available within Azure Cognitive Services. Today I’ll focus on the Knowledge APIs, which map complex information and data in order to solve tasks such as intelligent recommendations and semantic search.

First up is the QnA Maker API, which distills information into conversational, easy-to-navigate answers. You can use this to set up the type of interaction where you can ask a specific question, set it up against known data and it will go through and present answers that make sense. You can add this QnA API to any type of application. For example, it’s not a bad plan to create a bot that gives people what they need right away, giving you the ability to add an interactive chat until the time it’s necessary to speak to an actual person.

Check out Azure Data Week coming in October 2018.

The other knowledge API is the Custom Decision Service API, which is a cloud-based, contextual decision-making API that sharpens with experience. This uses reinforcement learning in a new approach for personalizing content; it responds to emerging trends in both your activity and things that you’re interested in.

This API is actually making decisions for you, using your patterns to present you with more personalized content, and it continues to try to learn more from you as time goes on to do a better job presenting personalized data for you.