Microsoft uses a variety of online digital tools to help its employees and users be more productive and efficient. These tools are used for various tasks, including communication, collaboration, project management, gaming, and research. This page provides information on some of Microsoft's online digital tools, their functions and applications.
Function: Azure Cognitive Search provides cloud search services with built-in AI capabilities.
Features: Cognitive skills for vision, language and speech, custom machine learning models.
Applications: Azure Cognitive Search has a variety of potential applications, including identifying and exploring relevant content at scale, reducing data ingestion and index creation complexity, orchestrating AI services for structuring data, and applying AI capabilities such as OCR, translation, key phrase extraction, location, people, and organisation detection.
Cost: Free (note: advanced cloud computing is not free)
Function: Bing Visual Search searches the web using an image instead of text.
Features: It is able to identify images and search the web for similar images. You can use the following ways to get an image in the Bring Visual Search platform: "Take a photo", "Paste image or URL", "Browse", "Find an image", or "Drag an image here".
Applications: It can be used to find similar images of products, pages that include an image, even recipes.
Cost: Free
Images for training data.
Function: Bot Emulator v2 makes it easy to test and debug bots and helps you create better bots faster. The Bot Framework v4 makes it easy to test and debug bots and helps you create better bots faster.
Features: Debugging tools, automated bug testing. You can use the Bot Framework Emulator to test bots locally on your machine or connect to bots running remotely through a tunnel.
Applications: It is a desktop application that allows bot developers to test and debug bots built using the Bot Framework SDK and for bot frameworks, debugging tools, automated bot testing.
Cost: Information not available.
Function: The Bot Framework Emulator v4 is a desktop application that allows bot developers to test and debug bots built using the Bot Framework SDK.
Features: The Emulator leverages a library that uses libsecret.
Applications: Bot Framework Emulator is a desktop application that allows bot developers to test and debug bots locally and remotely. Using the Emulator, you can chat with your bot and inspect the messages that your bot sends and receives.
Cost: You need to sign in with your Azure account, so the cost is according to the Azure account.
Function: Content Moderator lets you handle content that is potentially offensive, risky, or otherwise undesirable.
Features: It is an AI-powered content moderation service which scans text, images, and videos and applies content flags automatically.
Applications: Scenarios in which a software developer or team would require a content moderation service include online marketplaces, gaming companies, social messaging platforms, and enterprise media companies.
Cost: Free for one transaction per second (TPS) (note: 10 TPS is not free)
Function: Conversation Learner enables you to build and teach conversational interfaces that learn from example interactions.
Features: It considers the end-to-end context of dialogue to help improve responses and deliver more compelling user experiences.
Applications: Project Conversation Learner applies machine learning behind the scenes to create bots and intelligent agents that can help increase user satisfaction and reduce customer service costs. This approach reduces manual coding of dialogue control logic and enables business owners or domain experts to contribute to a conversational interface without prior machine learning knowledge.
Cost: Information not available.
Function: Cortana is a virtual assistant that uses the Bing search engine to perform tasks.
Features: Cortana can set reminders, add a task, play emails, join a Teams meeting.
Applications: It is a chat-based UI that gives you the ability to interact using typed or spoken natural language queries. You can resize, move, and dock the app window on your desktop to accommodate your preferred workflow. For example, you can dock Cortana next to a Teams window to accomplish quick tasks while staying engaged with your meeting. It provides calendar and schedule assistance, meeting help, finding out about people in your organisation, make lists and set reminders and alarms, and open apps.
Cost: Free
Function: DeBERTa provides pre-trained language models.
Features: It provides decoding-enhanced BERT with disentangled attention.
Applications: This allows the model to capture better the relationships between words and their positions in a sentence. The second technique is an improved mask decoder which replaces the output SoftMax layer to predict the masked tokens for model pre-training.
Cost: Free
Function: Designer generates designs and original images when you type in what you want.
Features: Turns words into designs.
Applications: It can be used to create social media posts, improve the layout of the assignment/presentation, and designs new images. You can begin with a template or create a design from scratch.
Cost: Needs a Microsoft account.
Function: KEAR (Knowledgeable External Attention for commenbense Reasoning) is a language model that generates texts.
Note: KEAR is still under development.
Function: Microsoft Pix is a camera app that improves photo quality using AI.
Features: It combines a stream of photos before and after you press the button, giving you the best possible image. It better focuses on objects (especially people) and makes images sharper and more in focus, even in low light. It adjusts settings when it detects faces.
Applications: Improved photo quality using AI. Sharper and clearer images.
Cost: Free on the App Store.
Function: Translator translates real-time conversations, menus, street signs, websites, documents, and text.
Features: A message is sent on the app and is automatically translated into the receiver's language.
Applications: It can be used in schools, while travelling, in businesses and the workplace.
Cost: Free on Google Play, App Store and Amazon.
Function: Personality Chat let's you change Bing's chatbot personality.
Features: Linked to Microsoft's Bing AI Chat.
Applications: A preference for the user and question asked can be set.
Cost: Free
Function: PowerBI is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together to turn your unrelated data sources into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights.
Applications: It can be used in business to make informed decisions based on real-life and real-time data. PowerBI can serve as the analytics, visualisation, and decision engine behind group projects, divisions, or entire corporations. But it can also be your personal data analysis and visualisation tool.
Cost: Licensed
Function: QnA Maker is a cloud-based Natural Language Processing (NLP) service that allows you to create a natural conversational layer over your data.
Features: Build conversational client applications which include social media apps, chatbots, and speech-enabled desktop applications.
Applications: QnA Maker can be used when you have static information, when you want to provide the same answer to a request, question or command, and when you want to manage a bot conversation that includes static information.
Cost: Three (3) managed documents are free per month.
Function: Bing Chat is GPT-4 powered.
Features: Powered by OpenAI's GPT-4, text, image and video answers, chat history, and Microsoft Edge integration.
Applications: Bing Chat has much the same applications as ChatGPT. See our ChatGPT guide for detailed information.
Cost: Free
Function: Viva is an integrated employee experience platform built within Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams that gives you the ability to support connection, insight, purpose, and growth in your organisation using your existing infrastructure.
Features: Open and extensible platform.
Applications: There are different Viva experiences, like Viva Connections, Viva Engage, Viva Insights, Viva Topics, Viva Learning, Viva Goals, and Viva Sales. Viva supports several partner integrations to give you access to industry-learning apps in the natural flow of work. The solution centre provides guidance to help understand, plan, and implement integrated Viva solutions.
Cost: 60 day free trial. Must have a Microsoft 365 account.