The One Minute AI - Azure Cognitive Services

Welcome to a new series of short articles I am presenting about Artificial Intelligence specifically in the Azure AI stack. The objective is that you will learn about an Azure-based AI service in no more than one minute and thus quickly get familiar with the entire stack over a short period of time. These are going to be short, easily digestible articles so let's get started!

Azure Cognitive Services are a collection of SDKs, services and APIs which are available to help developers build intelligent applications by incorporating readymade AI directly into their application, without the need to have AI or data science skills. Using Azure Cognitive Services allows your applications to see, hear, speak with and understand your users. There are five main areas of service- Vision, Speech, Language, Web Search and Decision.

The Vision APIs allow you to process images, detect and recognise faces, process and extract insights from videos, extract data from handwritten documents and much more.

Speech APIs include a machine translation service, speaker verification and identification as well as allowing you to add speech-enabled features to applications.

Language APIs allow natural language processing, key phrase extraction, language recognition and to extract insights from videos.

Search APIs include Bing News Search, Bing Video Search, Bing Entity Search, Bing Image Search, and Bing Video Search.

Decision APIs enable you to include content moderation in your applications, as well as monitor and detect abnormalities in your time series data.

These core languages are supported across Azure Cognitive Services,

Other languages are also available by service category.

Find out more,

• https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-services/
• https://hub.docker.com/_/microsoft-azure-cognitive-services
• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/welcome