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Semantic Kernel
The latest news from the Semantic Kernel team for developers
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Support for Azure.AI.OpenAI and OpenAI v2 is here

Update: We have released a new NuGet Gallery | Microsoft.SemanticKernel 1.18.1-rc release candidate which has been updated to depend on NuGet Gallery | OpenAI 2.0.0-beta.10 and NuGet Gallery | Azure.AI.OpenAI 2.0.0-beta.3. Today we are announcing that support for Azure.AI.OpenAI and OpenAI v2 .NET SDK is available in the Semantic Kernel v1.18.0-rc release candidate. This release supports the official OpenAI library for .NET which Microsoft announced at the Build 2024 conference. This new SDK ensures that .NET developers have parity with other programming language libraries when accessing Azure OpenAI models. T...

Guest Blog: Microsoft MVP Developed Course on Understanding Semantic Kernel

Today we're featuring an AI Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) who's been developing content on Semantic Kernel. We wanted to highlight Jamie Maguire's work and detail the multi-part blog below. Here's the link to his course: New Course: Understanding Semantic Kernel – Jamie Maguire https://jamiemaguire.net/index.php/2024/08/03/new-free-course-understanding-semantic-kernel/ Jamie has broken the Semantic Kernel content he's developed for an Understanding Semantic Kernel course into 7 parts. By the end of the course, you will understand: Learning Course Flow 0 – First Look, Integ...

Introducing enterprise multi-agent support in Semantic Kernel


The term "agent" has become a popular term within the industry. There have many different definitions, but at their core, they consist of a system prompt (i.e., a persona), plugins, and an ability to automatically reason and create plans to address user goals. Up until today, we've demonstrated how you could use components of Semantic Kernel to build agents. With just a few lines of code, you can use a chat completion model to answer user's questions and to automatically invoke plugins as necessary. What was missing, however, was a first-class agent abstraction. Not only would this simplify code by consolid...

What’s coming next? Summer / Fall roadmap for Semantic Kernel
It feels like yesterday when we went live with v1.0+ of all our SDKs (Python, Java, and C#) at Microsoft Build. Since then, the Semantic Kernel team has been hard at work making Semantic Kernel even better. Now that we've made some progress, we'd like to share what we have planned over the next few months for Microsoft Ignite. To see everything we have planned, check out the video below where I cover the 4 main areas we plan on investing in. You can also keep reading for a quick recap of our planned enhancements. Enhancing enterprise requirements We hear time and time again that the main value customers ...

Support for Azure.AI.OpenAI and OpenAI v2 is coming

Microsoft announced the official OpenAI library for .NET at the Build 2024 conference. This new SDK ensures that .NET developers have parity with other programming language libraries when accessing Azure OpenAI models. This means the new SDK will be able to support the latest OpenAI features and models as soon as they come out, such as GPT4o and Assistants v2, by providing a unified experience across OpenAI and Azure OpenAI. Since the release of the official OpenAI library for .NET, the Semantic Kernel team has been working on updating our existing OpenAI connectors to use the new V2 OpenAI library and Azure.A...

Announcing Semantic Kernel for Java 1.2.0

Hello Java AI developers! We are announcing the release of Semantic Kernel for Java v1.2.0! Since our release of v1.0 this past May, we have been working to improve and expand the capabilities we provide. Today, we are thrilled to share the latest updates, new features, and experimental features with you. What’s New in Semantic Kernel for Java v1.2.0? A new dedicated repository To get greater awareness of the Java version of Semantic Kernel, we've created a separate Java repository for it. Several folks had difficulty finding updates to the Java project, so it's now much easier to find at github.com/microso...

Customer Case Study: SimCorp’s AI Journey with Semantic Kernel

We're excited to feature the SimCorp team on the Semantic Kernel blog today. The SimCorp team will discuss their AI journey and how they’ve integrated Semantic Kernel to build out their AI solutions. Let’s dive into the details from the SimCorp team! SimCorp Background: SimCorp was founded in 1971 and has continuously innovated to create an industry-leading integrated investment management platform that’s built to turn avalanches of information into insights that lead to the decisions that put our clients ahead of the competition. SimCorp’s efficient, flexible front-to-back-offering, provides clients with S...

Planning with Semantic Kernel using Automatic Function Calling


Hello, everyone! AI planning is a powerful tool that allows to generate and execute complex workflows in applications based on specified goal. In Semantic Kernel, it's possible to implement planning logic using FunctionCallingStepwisePlanner class. Today we want to introduce a new way how to achieve the same results by using Automatic Function Calling. This approach produces the results more reliably and uses fewer tokens comparing to FunctionCallingStepwisePlanner. Setup For demonstration purposes, we will use 2 plugins to get current date/time and weather: For simplicity, let's define a helper function ...

The future of Planners in Semantic Kernel
Since the very earlier days of Semantic Kernel, we have shipped experimental “planners” that use prompts to generate multi-step plans. This was extremely powerful because it allowed developers to use LLMs (which were created to merely generate text) to begin automating business processes. Since then, the Semantic Kernel team has evolved its experimental planners over time so it could adopt the latest research from both inside and outside of Microsoft. Most notably, we began leveraging function calling. With function calling, the action planner could be replaced with a single function call request and the ReAct...