During the same week PyCon was going on, Microsoft had their annual Build conference. If you’re not familiar with this conference this is where Microsoft announces a lot of new things for developers. The main focus of this year’s Build was about artificial intelligence.

Also in the same way as PyCon, Microsoft records all of the sessions at Build so we’re free to watch them later. With that, I present to you what I think are the top five session at Build that go over artificial intelligence. Why top five instead of top ten like in the PyCon session post? Well, there just wasn’t enough to do a top ten. :)

10 Things Developers Need to Know about Building Intelligent Apps by Noelle LaCharite

This session goes a lot into the Cognitive Services. Not only how much it can improve your applications by incorporating them, but also how easy they are to implement.

The Microsoft AI platform: a State of the Union by Joseph Sirosh

Continuing with more information about Cognitive Services, this session goes into some of the other capabilities that were announced at Build. A nice demo they showed went over what they did with the released JFK files and how they used Cognitive Search to analyze all of that data.

DevOps for AI : Deploying everywhere by Paige Bailey

This is an interesting talk that goes into the basics of data science and machine learning, but also goes into how to integrate the mindset of DevOps into data science. Doing so can help with things like testing and version control as a process to doing data science which can help reproducability and putting models into production.

Microsoft AI overview for developers by Harry Shum

This video is full of great demos that show off the power of several Cognitive Services. Although, my favorite demo is the one where they show the power of having a bot on your site.

Demystifying Machine and Deep Learning for Developers by Seth Juarez and Chris Lauren

There are quite a few deep learning videos out there, but I firmly believe that this is one of the best. The way that Seth and Chris describe the deep learning process of the neural network algorithms makes it very understandable to what’s going on behind the scenes when you train a model.

So a lot of interesting things happened at build in terms of AI, mostly involving their Cognitive Services APIs. These APIs, I think, are going to really help make your apps stand out from the rest of the crowd and Microsoft looks to continue to add to them with APIs from their Cognitive Services Labs.

I’m definitely looking forward to what else they come up with.