Introduction to Cognitive Services

  • Article

In this article, I'm going to introduce Cognitive Services which is Microsoft's newest Artificial Intelligence Services hosted on Azure. Cognitive Services are a set of machine learning algorithms that Microsoft has developed to solve problems in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The goal of Cognitive Services is to democratize AI by packaging it into discrete components that are easy for developers to use in their own apps. Web and Universal Windows Platform developers can consume these algorithms through standard REST calls over the Internet to the Cognitive Services APIs.

Web, Universal Windows Platform, mobile developers can consume these algorithms through standard REST calls over the Internet to the Cognitive Services APIs. As in just API call, users can use these APIs easily without developing those machine learning algorithms. 

These cognitive services are mainly divided into 5 categories,

  • Vision
  • Speech
  • Language
  • Knowledge
  • Search

In Vision API, it includes Image understanding, facial recognition, emotion recognition, live video analyzer and more.

In the Speech API, it includes Bing Speech, Speaker recognition, Custom Speech service which can train a voice with some noise and other barriers and the Translator service.

In the Language API, it includes Translator text service, LUIS services, Text analytics services and more.

In the Knowledge API, it includes Custom Decision maker, Q and A maker, Recommendation service and more valuable services.

In the Search API, it includes each and every Bing search services such as News, Video, Image and Web Search.

You can view and try all Cognitive Services from here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/services/cognitive-services/

For the usage of API keys users can have them in the Azure portal

Will describe each API one by one in next blog series.