Today’s apps need to be smarter than ever to truly delight users. But integrating cutting-edge AI capabilities like natural language processing and machine learning is no easy task. It often requires months of specialized training and complex integrations with services like OpenAI’s powerful language models.
That’s where Microsoft’s experimental Smart Components project comes in, led by .NET creator Steve Sanderson. Smart Components aims to make adding AI superpowers to your .NET web and native apps a total breeze.
How do they work? Smart Components are pre-built, plug-and-play UI components infused with AI smarts right out of the box. Adding AI features is as simple as dropping one of these components into your app’s interface – no complex coding or machine learning voodoo is required.
Currently. three initial Smart Components have been released, each enhancing a common UI element with AI magic:
- Smart Paste: This AI-turbo-charged button lets users instantly populate forms using unstructured data from their clipboard. No more tedious retyping or copy/pasting across fields!
- Smart TextArea: An intelligent text input that can autocomplete whole sentences based on your specified tone, policies, and data sources. Typing has never been faster or more on-brand.
- Smart ComboBox: Upgrades the humble dropdown box with semantic search capabilities, surfacing the most relevant options as you type based on meaning, not just character matching.
Under the hood, the components integrate tightly with powerful AI services and models like OpenAI’s GPT language models and Microsoft’s Semantic Kernel. But you don’t need to be an AI expert – just plug and play.
The project generates embeddings locally for ultra-fast performance while leaning on cloud APIs for more intensive tasks. Looking ahead, Smart Components could expand beyond the web to native apps and may one day cover an AI-enabled version of every common UI control.
For .NET developers, this could be a game-changer – easily transforming apps into hyper-productive, intelligent tools without months of machine learning R&D. With Smart Components, the AI-powered app revolution is just a few components away.
