Getting Started With Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services

Overview

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 Text Analytics API, as described by Microsoft, is designed to detect sentiment, key phrases, topics, and language from your text. It is a suite of text analytics web services built with Azure Machine Learning. No training data is needed to use this API; just bring your text data. This API uses advanced natural language processing techniques to deliver best in class predictions.

We will learn more about Text Analytics API in later articles. To start with, let's create Cognitive account to use Text Analytics 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.

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Fill in below details

Account Name
Unique name for cognitive Text Analytics 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 Text Analytics 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
textanalyticswithKasam.
Subscription
Have selected my subscription.
Resource Group
Created new resource group for grouping Cognitive related services, named CodeCognitivewithKasam
API Type
Cognitive services provide set of awesome APIs. For this article, selected Text Analytics API.

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

Pricing Tier

For Text Analytics API selected, the below pricing option 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 below box could be seen in Dashboard (if would have opted to pin it, while creating).

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

Overview => Will list all details associated with Text Analytics API Cognitive account.

Endpoint is base URL of Restful Text Analytics API provided by Microsoft. Will look into it with deep details in coming articles.

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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 Text Analytics API services.

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

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

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Summary

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