AI Services: Cognitive Services

Introduction

With the increasing complexity of everyday applications, there has been an increased demand for building innovative applications exhibiting human-similar capabilities. These scenarios include applications that need to understand voice commands (like Apple’s Siri) or even recognize particular objects in an image. These abilities are often called cognitive abilities.

Building such functionality requires non-trivial know-how in AI (artificial intelligence). Unfortunately, these skills are outside the typical developer’s skillset. Luckily, Microsoft Azure provides cloud-based AI services that help us inject cognitive ability into our application without any AI skill. These services are called Azure Cognitive services, enabling us to add hearing, speaking, and analysis functionalities to our applications.

Types of Azure Cognitive services

Microsoft Azure offers four main types of cognitive services (also called APIs):

• Vision: These are APIs that offer vision abilities and include: computer vision APIs to recognize objects and writings in images, face APIs to identify and detect human faces from scenes, and custom vision APIs to build and deploy your classifiers.
• Speech: These are APIs that provide text-to-speech, speech-to-text features, and translation features.
• Language: These are APIs that can understand and analyze text.
• Decision: These APIs help us make decisions about our

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