With Open Source Strategy, Microsoft initiated Cognitive Services, which expands on Microsoft's evolving portfolio of machine learning APIs, and enables developers to easily add intelligent features such as emotion and video detection, facial, speech, and vision recognition, and speech and language understanding into their applications.

Microsoft Cognitive Services (formerly, Project Oxford) are a set of APIs, SDKs, and services available for developers to make their applications more intelligent, engaging, and discoverable. These APIs of Cognitive Services are hosted on Microsoft-managed data centers.