The Future of Apps Lies with Azure Cognitive Services

With acquisition of a vast amount of knowledge in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning algorithms, and with their day by day smart usage, possibilities of enhancement on any of your modern applications are just tremendous. Azure Cognitive services are icing on the cake!

Since its inception, Microsoft Azure has always bagged so much into its kitty. And talking in particular about Azure Cognitive Services, the overall experience is just amazing! With smart use of APIs available in cognitive services, you can infuse your apps, websites and bots with intelligent algorithms to see, hear, speak, understand and interpret your user needs through natural methods of communication.

With Azure Cognitive Services’ APIs, it becomes so easy to enhance your applications in 5 areas: vision, speech, language, knowledge and search, so you can take advantage of the possibilities that AI has to offer.

Let us understand in detail as what these APIs are offering us:

Vision

Vision makes it possible for apps and services to accurately identify and analyze content within images and videos. Providing APIs through which developers can process the image, either by uploading it or providing the image URL to analyze visual content to extract information.

1. Content Moderator

This features helps with the identification of explicit or offensive content moderation for images and videos. It makes sure we are displaying appropriate content in videos.

2. Computer Vision

This feature returns information about visual content found in an image, like a celebrity or landmark, scene and activity recognition, optical character recognition, and handwriting recognition.

3. Facial Recognition

It detects a human face with high precision face location in the image. It also detects facial attributes, gender, age, pose, hair, and more. It also helps in emotion and similar face recognition and grouping in images. It is extremely helpful with security and identity management.

4. Custom Vision

This service provides us with an API through which we can upload an image, build and train a custom image classifier.

5. Video Indexer

It is built using Azure Media Analytics, Cognitive Services, and Azure Search. It extracts information like speaker indexing, video/audio text recognition, object, scene and activity detection, translation, audio and key frame extraction, analysis and more.

Speech

Speech enables the integration of speech processing capabilities into any app or service. Convert spoken language into text or produce natural sounding speech from text using standard (or customizable) voice fonts.

1. Speech Translation

This provides real time speech to text translation in various languages on the fly as well as automated and Customizable translation.

2. Speaker Recognition

This is mainly used for speaker verification and identification

3. Speech-to-Text APIs

It allows automatic and customizable speech recognition and speech transcription (speech-to-text), as well as Customizable speech models for unique vocabularies or accents.

4. Text-to-Speech APIs

It allows Automatic and Customizable speech recognition and speech transcription (text- to- speech), as well as Customizable speech models for unique vocabularies or accents.

Language

Language services ensure that apps and services can understand the meaning of unstructured text or recognize the intent behind a speaker’s utterances.

1. Bing spell check

This API focusses on Web-scale, multi-lingual spell check and contextual grammar.

2. LUIS

Language Understanding Service processes the user’s natural conversational language and understands it to figure out the overall meaning for fetching relevant information.

3. Text Analytics

It works on text data and functions such as name, sentiment analysis, language detection, and key phrase extraction.

4. Translator Text

This API translates text in near real-time for more than sixty languages. It also supports Automatic language detection and text translation.

5. Linguistic Analysis

An NLP tool for identifying the structure of text such as sentence separation, tokenization, and parts of speech tagging.

Knowledge

It creates rich knowledge resources that can be integrated into apps and services with Knowledge services.

1.QnA Maker

This provides a service which helps in Knowledge creation from collections of Q&As. Q&A can also be extracted from unstructured text.

2. Custom Decision Service

This is a contextual decision-making API which creates the intelligent app and helps in Semantic matching for knowledge bases. It converts content for further processing for machine learning and tries to understand it in terms of an image, video, text, and more.

Search

Enable apps and services to harness the power of a web-scale, ad-free search engine with Search.

1. Bing News Search

This news search API provides ad-free news search results from a search query to Bing News. It also helps in the identification of trending topics.

2. Bing Web Search

 This API provides results which are location-based, ad-free and safe. They may include an image, video, web page, or news.

3. Bing Visual Search

This API helps the user in Identification of similar images and products, Websource identification and in Knowledge acquisition from images.

4. Bing Video Search

This is a video search engine which gives Ad Free Video search results from Bing Videos as well as also provide video topic and trend identification.

5. Bing Entity Search

This API mainly returns local results with named entity or classification like popular persons, hotels, restaurants, and more.

6. Bing Custom Search

It enables the developer to create tailored search experiences for specific topics and ad-free results.

7. Bing Image Search

This API returns with searched images related to a query search.

8. Bing Autosuggest

This API comes up with a list of suggested queries based on the partial query string the user enters in the search box.

Conclusion

Learning more and more about Azure Cognitive Services is interesting in itself. These services are very promising for anyone who is depending on ready-to-use APIs and wants to enhance and expand their applications, bringing the benefits of AI and Machine Learning into the products. These services are a perfect example as to why you should use the cloud and its intelligent services.

At Beyond Key, we have a team of Azure Cloud and services experts who have been busy infusing apps, websites, and chatbots with intelligent algorithms and building masterpiece applications. If you have any questions or a project idea in mind, we are just a message away! Contact us here or schedule a demo with one of our cloud experts, and we will get back to you in less than one business day.