Announcing the Table of Azure Cognitive Services

I’m excited to announce that I’ve teamed up with jumpto365’s Matt Wade and Niels Gregers Johansen to release the newest addition in the Microsoft Periodic Table series: The Table of Azure Cognitive Services!

I’ve frequently used their Periodic Table of Office 365 for customer workshops so I liked the idea of doing something similar for AI services and tools. Given the fact that I already create a lot of infographics and chatbots, this seemed like a natural progression into an experience familiar to many in our field.

Introducing the Table of Azure Cognitive Services

With more than 30 Cognitive Services APIs that you can implement in solutions of different kinds (e.g., chatbots, mobile apps, websites), Microsoft has made major progress in terms of offerings for plug-and-play solutions that deliver various types of intelligence based on machine learning models. The Cognitive Services can be grouped into six categories: Vision, Speech, Language, Knowledge, Search, and Labs.

Jump to product page directly

Each tile in the Table offers a link to the product page of the select Cognitive Service API. All of those product pages offer links to the documentation, pricing, getting started guides, and live demos.

You can immediately get going and try them out online without the needing to create services in Azure or elsewhere. This lets you check if the service offers what you are looking for before spending money and time on the idea.

Sources

All information which can be found in the Cognitive Services Table can be found on the Azure Cognitive Services site.

If any changes are made by Microsoft on the offering of the Cognitive Services APIs, we will update the Table as well, so that it’s constantly up to date.

A note about Labs

Except for the Labs category, all of the Cognitive Services are either generally available (GA) or in public preview status. Since they’re available to all users worldwide, the services in those categories are included in the Table.

The APIs in Labs can be seen as private preview, with limited access for testing them. The goal of Microsoft’s product team for one of the Labs’ APIs is to discern if there is a need for the specific API and that the business case is valid. As a result, the APIs in Labs often change.

Therefore, we decided to exclude them from this Table for now since the category is in regular flux and the APIs aren’t available to everyone. Visit the Labs APIs page to learn more about those services.

Wrap up

This is only the beginning of the Table of Azure Cognitive Services. We will continuously update the Table with more features and functions to make it better over time. If you have anything you would want to see on the next version of the Table, please let me know in a comment below.

To learn more about my work and what I do, please visit my website and follow me on Twitter.