Hello, and welcome to using Azure AI services to build customer solutions. In this learning path, you'll find out how to combine various Azure services to add artificial intelligence to your customer-facing websites and apps. My name is Guy Hummel. I'm the Azure Content Lead at Cloud Academy, and I'll be your instructor for these courses. 

With all of the excitement about machine learning in the news, you might think that you'll have to build machine learning models yourself in order to add artificial intelligence to your applications. You could certainly do that by using Azure Machine Learning services, but it's much easier to take advantage of Azure's pre-built AI solutions. Microsoft provides quite a variety of AI services. The majority of them are part of its Cognitive Services suite, which offers APIs for vision, speech, language, knowledge, and search. 

These pre-built models can handle everything from emotion recognition in images to real-time speech translation. To introduce you to these AI services, I could give an overview of each one at a high level, but instead, I'm going to take you on a deep dive into two specific use cases, that way you'll have a much better idea of how to implement these AI services in your own organization. I've chosen two of the most common ways that companies add artificial intelligence to their customer interactions. 

First, if you have a help desk, then there are probably a handful of questions that get asked much more frequently than others. If you could automate the responses to those questions, it would not only reduce your costs, but it would also let your help desk personnel focus on the more complex, more interesting questions. The second use case is even more common.

 If your organization sells products, or even if it offers free items such as news articles, then you can increase sales or customer engagement by adding recommendations for other items that your customers might want. Even if you already have a recommendation system, it might be possible to get better recommendations by building a more finely-tuned model, which I'll show you how to do. 

These short, high-focused courses are a good way to get started with artificial intelligence. So if you're ready, then go to the first course and find out how to build a chatbot on Azure.