Getting Started With Azure Cognitive Services

This article will cover the following.

  • Brief concepts and prerequisites
  • Implementation – Create a new Azure Cognitive Service
  • Implementation – Access the cognitive service

Brief Concepts

What is Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services?

  • It was formerly named Project Oxford.
  • These are a set of APIs, SDKs, and services available to developers to make their applications more intelligent, engaging and discoverable.
  • It expands on Microsoft’s evolving portfolio of machine learning APIs and enables developers to easily add intelligent features – such as emotion and video detection; facial, speech and vision recognition; and speech and language understanding – into their applications.
  • Here, Vision is for more personal computing experiences and enhanced productivity aided by systems that increasingly can see, hear, speak, understand, and even begin to reason.

Prerequisites

Implementation – Create a new Azure Cognitive Service

Steps to be followed.

  • Open Azure portal, click on "Add", and choose category “Cognitive Services” and then select an option of “Bing Search APIs”.
  • Fill in the details, create a new resource group, and click on “Create”.
  • Go the “All resources” section and see the newly created “Cognitive-service” named as “cognitive-service-25-08”.
  • Open the particular cognitive service and see the different options present there.

Implementation – Access the Cognitive Service

Steps to be followed -

  • In the opened section of the cognitive-service, click on the “quick-start” option and see all four steps.
  • Click on the first section and grab the keys and store it in your file system – maybe in a Notepad file.
  • Click on the second option and choose “Bing Image Search API reference”.
  • Click on the link and it will open a documentation link for us. Read that article thoroughly although I will demonstrate whatever is written in the article.
  • Now, grab the first end-point from there to search the image using Cognitive Service APIs.
  • Install postman and let’s try out this API and try to search any image. For that, paste the URL at postman and provide the request headers and the key. You can paste what you grabbed in previous steps and mention the query string. Here, I mentioned – apple.
  • Click on "Send" and see the image of “apple” string in bing.com. Here, you can see the total results as 983.
  • Copy one of the web links from there and paste it into the browser. See the result.
 

Happy Learning!