Getting Started With Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services

This article is in continuation of my articles related to Cognitive Services. I came across some complicated articles on Cognitive Services, but as I've been working on this service for the last six months, I thought of writing simple, step by step articles on the same.

If you have landed directly on this article, I also recommend you read the following.

As defined, Cognitive Services provide the best suite for having interactive, automated models of application. It helps to build powerful intelligence into applications to enable natural and contextual interactions.

The Academic Knowledge API, as described by Microsoft, explores relationships among academic papers, journals, and authors. Also, it taps into the wealth of academic content in the Microsoft Academic Graph using the Academic Knowledge API.

Interpret

Interpret is a natural language user query string. Get annotated interpretations to enable rich search-box auto-completion experiences that anticipate what you are typing.

Evaluate

Evaluate a query expression and get Academic Knowledge entity results.

Calchistogram

Calculate a histogram of the distribution of attribute values for the academic entities returned by a query expression, such as the distribution of citations by year for a given author.

We will learn more about Academic Knowledge API in later articles. To start with, let's create Cognitive account to use Academic Knowledge API, using Azure Portal.

Here, let's assume that you have Azure Portal account. If not, create your free Azure account.

Once done with account creation, Click '+’ => Category, Intelligence + analytics => Services, Cognitive Services APIs.

Fill in below details

Account Name
Unique name for cognitive Academic Knowledge API account.
Subscription
Free; or in case of any subscription you have, must be selected here.
API Type
Cognitive Service provides set of awesome APIs. For this article, will go with Academic Knowledge API.
Pricing Tier
As per API selected, pricing option will be listed. Select anyone among the listed options.
Resource Group
Can select existing Resource group or create new.
Account Name
academicwithKasam
Subscription
Have selected my subscription.
Resource Group
Created new resource group for grouping Cognitive related services, named CodeCognitivewithKasam
API Type
Cognitive services provides a set of awesome APIs. For this article, selected Academic Knowledge API.

Currently, the Cognitive Service is in Preview and hence only available at Western US locations. Once we select Academic Knowledge API from list of APIs, the location will get set to ' West US'.

Pricing Tier

For Academic Knowledge API selected, the below pricing options are listed. Let's select Free as pricing tier. You can go with other options, which are available in the free trial account.

Cognitive Services

Once done with choosing pricing tier, Click on "Legal Terms" option. A blade with detailed terms will be displayed.

Read it carefully and then click, I Agree => Create..

After successful creation, the below box could be seen in Dashboard (if you have opted to pin it, while creating it).

Click on Resource groups => CodeCognitivewithKasam (resource group selected) => Overview. Academic Knowledge API cognitive account created will be listed. Click on the account name.

Overview => Will list all details associated with Academic Knowledge API Cognitive account.

Endpoint is base URL of RESTful Academic Knowledge API provided by Microsoft. Will look into it with deep details in coming articles.

Cognitive Services

Click on Keys under Resource Management. This will list the key details (Key 1, Key 2), which we will be using in our application to leverage Academic Knowledge API services.

We can also regenerate this Key by clicking Regenerate Key option available, as shown below.

Click on Quick Start for a quick introduction of Cognitive Services, along with API documentation to use Cognitive Academic Knowledge APIs

Summary

How easy it is to get started with Cognitive Services. By now, we have seen how effortlessly we can create Cognitive Services Academic Knowledge API account, using Microsoft Azure Portal. We can use the Keys being generated, to allow our app to communicate with intelligent Academic Knowledge API.

In later articles, we will use Keys and look at how this could be used in our application. I would recommend you try this and be ready with Keys.

Happy Azure coding!