// the find
microsoft/ailab
Experience, Learn and Code the latest breakthrough innovations with Microsoft AI
A Microsoft-branded collection of AI demo projects from circa 2018-2020, covering things like cognitive search on JFK files, a Google Assistant connector for Bot Framework, sketch-to-code, and a few other experiments. It's aimed at developers who want to see specific Azure Cognitive Services wired together with concrete code rather than reading docs.
The JFK Files project is the most interesting piece — it shows a real end-to-end Azure Cognitive Search pipeline with custom skills, OCR, and a React frontend against genuinely unusual source material. The Google Assistant connector for Bot Framework fills a specific gap that Microsoft never officially bridged. Several projects include ARM templates and deployment scripts, so you can actually run them rather than just read them. The mix of C# backend and TypeScript frontend gives you both sides of the stack.
The repo hasn't been meaningfully touched since mid-2024 and most of the projects target APIs and SDKs that are two or three generations old — Bot Framework v3 patterns, pre-unified Cognitive Services endpoints, old LUIS. The ailab.microsoft.com website linked throughout is dead. There's no monorepo tooling or shared dependency management; each project is its own island with its own package.json or .csproj that may or may not still resolve. If you're learning Azure AI today, this will actively mislead you about current APIs.