Using your Voice to Search Microsoft Identity Manager – Part 1

Introduction

Yes, you’ve read the title correctly. Speaking to Microsoft Identity Manager. The concept behind this was born off the back of some other work I was doing with Microsoft Cognitive Services. I figured it shouldn’t be that difficult if I just break down the concept into individual elements of functionality and put together a proof of concept to validate the idea. That’s what I did and this is the first post of the solution as an overview.

Here’s a quick demo.

Overview

The diagram below details the basis of the solution. There are a few extra elements I’m still working on that I’ll cover in a future post if there is any interest in this.

The solution works like this;

1. You speak to a microphone connected to a single board computer with the query for Microsoft Identity Manager
2. The spoken phrase is converted to text using Cognitive Speech to Text (Bing Speech API)
3. The text phrase is;
   1. sent to Cognitive Services Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS) to identify the target of the query (firstname lastname) and the query entity (e.g. Mailbox)
   2. Microsoft Identity Manager is queried via API Management and the Lithnet REST API for the MIM Service
4. The result is returned to the single board computer as a text result phase which it then uses Cognitive Services Text to Speech to convert the response to audio
5. The result is spoken back

Key Functional Elements

• The microphone array I’m using is a ReSpeaker Core v1 with a ReSpeaker Mic Array
• All credentials are stored in an Azure Key Vault
• An Azure Function App (PowerShell) interfaces with the majority of the Cognitive Services being used
• Azure API Management is used to front end the Lithnet MIM Webservice
• The Lithnet REST API for the MIM Service provides easy integration with the MIM Service

Summary

Leveraging a lot of Serverless (PaaS) Services, a bunch of scripting (Python on the ReSpeaker and PowerShell in the Azure Function) and the Lithnet REST API it was pretty simple to integrate the ReSpeaker with Microsoft Identity Manager. An alternative to MIM could be any other service you have an API interface into. MIM is obviously a great choice as it can aggregate from many other applications/services.

Why a female voice? From a small response it was the popular majority.

Let me know what you think on twitter @darrenjrobinson