Sam Nasr on Azure AI & ML - Episode 185

This week, Sam Nasr returns to the show. Sam is an IT Consultant specializing in .Net, SQL Server, and Azure. He is a Sr. Software Engineer focused on the Microsoft stack of technologies including .Net, SQL Server, Azure. As part of NIS Technologies, he provides consulting services, training, and custom app development to bring more value to business applications. Sam is also a leader at the Cleveland C#/VB .Net user group.   Topics of Discussion: [2:37] Sam talks about getting inspiration from a video featuring Saquib Shaikh, a blind software engineer at Microsoft that developed services that helped him get by day-to-day, which was made public. It was a moving video and it got him into cognitive services, and he started diving more into AI and ML from that point. [4:10] How are AI and machine learning similar? How are they different? [4:15] Do you have to use the Azure services? [6:27] What are some of Sam’s favorite AI or ML products? [8:03] With Azure Cognitive Services, it’s a variety of different services. There are some for language, some for speech, some for vision, and decision-making. [10:19] How do we go from a microphone to a text string? Does that happen on the end device, or do we send the file to Azure? [15:10] What is the testing method for this type of application? [18:09] How does this relate to bot framework? [24:28] What applications does it tend to work best on? [26:50] What does it look like to deploy a new release candidate from environment to environment and then to production? What is the promotion process of an application like this? [30:39] You need to have a good representation of your data. It’s got to be clean and then trained on an appropriate number of records.   Mentioned in this Episode: Architect Tips — New video podcast! Azure DevOps Clear Measure (Sponsor) .NET DevOps for Azure: A Developer’s Guide to DevOps Architecture the Right Way, by Jeffrey Palermo — Available on Amazon! Jeffrey Palermo’s YouTube Jeffrey Palermo’s Twitter — Follow to stay informed about future events!   Want to Learn More? Visit AzureDevOps.Show for show notes and additional episodes.   Sam Naser: GitHub projects YouTube Presentations [email protected]   Overview of Cognitive Services:  “Adding Machine Learning to .Net Applications” youtube.com/watch?v=dMHlbZvISUI Build 2016 AI Video