Azure Cognitive Services

In this article, we’re going to discuss what are Azure Cognitive Services and we are going to look into an overview of various cognitive services offered by Azure.

Azure Cognitive Services are cloud-based artificial intelligence (AI) services that aid developers in absorbing cognitive intelligence into their applications without the need for direct AI or data science skills or knowledge. They are accessible via REST APIs and client library SDKs in popular programming languages. Azure Cognitive Services enables developers to easily include cognitive solutions that can see, hear, speak, and analyze in their applications.

Cognitive Services can be categorized into four major categories:

Vision — Mostly used for image recognition.

Speech — Used to recognize and convert speech to text and vice versa.

Language — Used to identify natural language and learn from human interactions.

Decision — Used to identify patterns in data and take necessary actions.

1. Vision

The Vision API is in charge of dealing with image and video data. You can use this API to build interactive applications that recognize images and videos and extract useful information from them.

You can use this API to build interactive applications that recognize images and videos and extract useful information from them. For example, you can use APIs to extract the type of objects in an image or convert handwritten notes to text documents, among other things. The following are some of the main APIs available in this category:

· Image analysis

This enables users to perform image classification, extract sentiment from images, read handwriting and convert it to text, or add descriptions to images based on the intent in the images.

· Form Recognizer

This API is capable of reading data from forms and converting it to electronic formats. Useful for converting paper-based documents into digital PDFs.

· Video Indexer

This API allows users to generate captions from videos, identify content, search for specific content, and interpret the text in videos. And also, this tool is capable of stripping a video of your own choice. frame by frame and return a text-based description of each one.

· Face recognizer

This API is specifically designed to detect and identify people’s faces, interpret emotions, and securely recognize faces, and can then be integrated with existing applications.

Figure 1 — Vision — Image Recognition API

Figure 2 — Vision — Intelligent, real-time and scalable video processing in Azure

2. Speech

The second category we’re going to discuss is related to natural speech recognition engines. Those of you who have used products like Dragon Naturally Speaking, Windows Speech Recognition, Braina, or Sonix are well aware of the difficulty in integrating speech recognition software into your workflow. Microsoft Azure provides AI-based speech services like STT and TTS that are far more accurate than their non-AI counterparts. The following are the most important speech services.

· Speech to Text

This service converts an audible conversation into textual data that can be read and searched. One example is voice-based typing services, in which you can speak, and your speech is converted to text as you go.

· Text to Speech

The inverse of the speech-to-text service. This converts text to speech using a live voice. This voice has automated modulation, which gives it the looks of a human reading the text.

· Speech Translation

This service converts speeches from one language to another in real-time as users speak. Many online translation applications now make use of this feature to translate their users’ voice conversations.

· Speaker Recognition

This is a new service and is still in preview mode. It can be used to identify speeches from the person and identify them accordingly.

Figure 3 — Language Service — Q&A Maker

Figure 4 — Language Service –Text-to-Speech Services

3. Language

Language APIs are one of the most popular Azure Cognitive Services. These APIs enable users to analyze texts and recognize intents and entities in them. This allows your application to communicate with your customers in a more natural manner. There are a variety of services available in this category as well.

· Immersive Reader

This is a Microsoft service that allows users to generate meaningful information from text. Assume you have a document and want to deduce the meaning of the text from it. In this case, you can make use of this API to extract meaning from your document.

· LUIS

This service is used for natural Language Understanding and Interpretation Services. You can use this in your chatbots to learn from users as they talk and interact with your bot

· Q&A Maker

Microsoft created the Q&A Maker application to manage FAQ question banks for chatbots. If your organization has a FAQ page, you can use that information in the Q&A Maker, and the chatbot will display that information to users as they interact with the bot.

· Text Analytics

Text Analytics services are mostly used to identify sentiments and named entities in texts provided to these APIs. It is beneficial when analyzing the sentiments of tweets or other social media applications.

· Translator

This is a new service that allows you to translate from one language to another in real-time. At the time of writing, there is support for more than 90 languages.

Figure 5 — Language Service — LUIS

4. Decision

The Decision API services are used to apply machine learning algorithms to the dataset. These services aid in the decision-making process by identifying data patterns and trends within the dataset. You can use these services without knowing anything about how they work behind the scenes. Microsoft handles the implementation and training of the models behind the scenes and exposes the results via the API. The following are the main services available in this category.

· Anomaly Detector

This is used to identify anomalies in the underlying dataset. You can detect values that should not exist in a dataset and take appropriate actions as a result.

· Content Moderator

This API assist in the monitoring of social media applications by identifying and flagging offensive content such as posts or videos. It is a very useful feature that can be found on nearly any social media platform.

· Personalizer

This API assist in the monitoring of social media applications by identifying and flagging offensive content such as posts or videos. It is a very useful feature that can be found on nearly any social media platform.

Figure 6 — Decision Services — Anomaly Detector

Conclusion

In this article, we looked at Cognitive Services in Azure. when talking about Azure Cognitive services, there are mainly four services which come to our mind. Vision helps in the identification of images and videos. You can use video analysis to identify people or objects in them. You can use Speech to enable your applications to convert speech to text or vice versa, as well as to implement speech translation. Language is another cognitive service that allows customers to understand the natural language of users and provide desired outputs. These are commonly used in chatbots to understand user input. We can use algorithms like Anomaly Detectors or Personalizers in the Decision section to enable your applications to behave in real-time scenarios. Furthermore, Azure’s most valuable asset has to be integration — all of these cognitive services will fit nicely onto your platform without any additional tweaking.

References

https://azure.microsoft.com.

https://stackify.com.

https://www.sqlshack.com.

Hope you got an idea about what Azure Cognitive services are and let’s meet up in another article :)