In this post, we’re looking at writing Azure Functions in Python and walk through the most common usage patterns. Over the past months, I’ve used Azure Functions in nearly every project I’ve been working on. They have come a long way in terms of feature set and language support, and overall offer a great way […]
Over the past year at Microsoft, I worked with a lot of partners and customers to build their customer-facing chatbots on Azure using the Bot Framework. The Bot Framework is Microsoft’s open source framework for building chat- and speech-enabled bots and virtual assistants. This post points out the key differences between Microsoft Bot Framework v3 […]
This post explains how to configure CORS (Cross-origin resource sharing) on Azure Search. Over the past few months, I’ve been using Azure Search in several projects, mostly as an easy and quick way for making semi-structured and unstructured data searchable (e.g., text documents or PDFs). In most cases, Azure Search is used in the backend […]
Introduction Last week at Ignite 2018, Microsoft released a public preview of their new Azure Machine Learning Services. The outcome is a much easier to understand and clearer product portfolio for everything that evolves around building custom Machine Learning models, including: Data handling and cleaning Model training and testing (including automated training) Model deployment and […]
Overview This post is a quickstart tutorial for getting to know what Azure Search is all about. Hence, we’ll walk through the key features of Azure Search and look at how to use them through its REST API. Azure Search is a “search-as-a-service” offering in Azure that allows developers to quickly index and search through […]
In this post, we’ll look into how we can use Azure’s Kubernetes Service (AKS) to host internal applications without exposing them to the world wide web. Undeniably, Kubernetes gained massive interest of the community over the past years. However, while Kubernetes is often used to run web-facing applications, especially enterprise customers start leveraging Kubernetes for […]
Overview In this post we’ll be covering how we can leverage Azure Active Directory for authenticating users during a conversation with a chatbot. As the most simple use case, we’ll be requesting the user’s first and last name through the Graph API. In this example we’ll focus on Node.js-based bots running on Azure Bot Service. […]
Overview In this post we’ll walk through how to get Arduino development with the NodeMCU for a simple IoT (Internet of Things) setup started. As the IoT device, we use the popular ESP8266-based NodeMCU platform and then hook it up to Azure IoT Hub. From there, we archive all our message into Azure Blob. The […]
Overview Chatbots are quickly evolving from being little toys to becoming the initial touchpoints for new and existing customer interactions. Due to the significant advances in natural language processing, bots are becoming more and more “human-like” and it will become increasingly difficult to distinguish between bots and humans in the future. The rapidly emerging feature […]
Overview In this post we will build a face recognition system for verifying individuals in images. For this, we will be using the Azure Cognitive Services Face API and a few simple lines of Python code. The Face API in Azure allows you to easily detect faces in images and extract facial landmarks such as […]