Getting Started With Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services

If you have landed over directly on this article, I also recommend you to read the articles mentioned below,

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

Recommendations API as described by Microsoft, is designed to provide personalized product recommendations for your customers and improve sales in your store.

You will learn more about Recommendations API in later articles. To start with, let's create a cognitive account to use Recommendations 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 the details, mentioned below.

Account Name

Unique name for cognitive Recommendations API account.

Subscription

Free, or any subscription you have must be selected here.

API Type

Cognitive Services provides a set of awesome APIs. For this article, I will go with Recommendations API Pricing Tier: As per the API selected, pricing options will be listed. Select any one among the listed options.

Resource Group

You can select existing Resource group or create a new one.

Category

Account Name- RecommendcongowithKasam.
Subscription- Have selected my subscription.
Resource Group- Created new resource group for grouping Cognitive related services, naming, CodeCognitivewithKasam.
API Type Cognitive services provides a set of awesome APIs. For this article, I will go with Recommendations API.

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

Pricing Tier

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

Once done with choosing pricing tier, Click => Create.

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After successful creation, the box, mentioned below, can be seen in Dashboard.

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

Overview => It will list all the details associated with Recommendations API Cognitive account.

Endpoint is base URL of Restful Recommendations APIs provided by Microsoft. I will look into it in the coming articles.

Category

Click on Keys under Resource Management. This will list the key details (Key 1, Key 2) which we will use in our Application to leverage Recommendations API services.

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

Category

Click on Quick Start for getting a quick introduction of Cognitive Services, along with API documentation, to use cognitive Recommendations APIs.

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Summary

How easy is it to get started with Cognitive Services? By now, we saw how effortlessly we created Cognitive Services Recommendations API account, using Microsoft Azure portal.

We can use these keys being generated to allow our app to communicate with awesome Recommendations APIs.

In later articles, we will use these keys and look at how this can be used in our Application.

I would recommend to try this and be ready with the keys.

Happy Azure coding.