What are Cognitive Services
Microsoft is a pioneer in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Coupling with its leading technology in IoT and cloud, the tech giant offers the best technology at the tips of your finger.
Now promoting democratizing AI vision for everyone and every organization, “Cognitive Services is about taking all of the machine learning and AI smarts that we have in this company and exposing them to developers through easy-to-use APIs, so that they don’t have to invent the technology themselves.
Why is it becoming more and more popular?
The technology can be applied to all industries bringing benefits in different aspects. Let’s go straight to some examples of Cognitive services in real businesses scenarios.
For example, in Retail, interactive AI bot can boost customer engagement. Retailers can now deliver customers the differentiated, personalized service and cohesive customer journey. As well as, thanks to more advanced customer behavior analysis and personalized shopping experiences.
Uber, for instance, provides platform security with the help of the Face API. It offers Real-time ID verification of their selfies to ensure that the driver is the same person listed on the account. Another example is Azure Machine Learning for one of the most popular weather forecast service – AccuWeather.
Core functional categories of Azure Cognitive Services
Microsoft as a leading giant in AI offers a rich collection of cloud-based APIs help developers create intelligent applications. Cognitive Services provides pre-trained models that are built purposely. As well as, you can easily leverage and use without a steep learning curve.
- Vision: detect and analyze content within images and videos. For example, it provides your apps with advanced algorithms to process and extract information from images (using Computer Vision API) and videos (using Video API). Content Moderator helps you to automate with higher accuracy of content monitoring. As Uber example above, Face API provides algorithms in face recognition and detection. All these APIs gives you powerful insights about images, videos, faces, and emotions to build customer-centric and personalized apps.
- Speech: you can build speech-enabled applications with the ability to detect, process and convert speech to text or vice versa. Moreover, the support is across multiple languages with control for customers to create their own language model with customized speaking styles.
- Language: from texts, your applications can understand unstructured texts and the underlying meanings. Similar to human cognitive ability, the Language Understanding service (LUIS) can process natural language, evaluate sentiment to understand what customers want truly. Some other services include Text Translation, Text Analytics, Bing Spell Check.
- Knowledge: going beyond Language, now you can create Q&A base from your existing content thanks to algorithms that can process a vast amount of data, detect and extract relevant information.
Search: Azure utilizes its own Bing engine to provide you with the power of Web-scale and ad-free search in your apps and services.
Key benefits:
MS Cognitive Services offer powerful and convenient tools to collaborate with other technologies like IoT. With IoT, you unavoidably get a massive amount of mostly unstructured data. Thus, applications with cognitive power can transform your raw data into valuable information. These business insights can be turned into your comparative advantages to generate values and revenues.
Easy Access:
You can easily access services in Azure which you can try out free of charge. Azure offers free trial subscription so you can have your own taste.
Easy Adoption and Minimal development effort for state-of-the-art AI services:
Microsoft provides powerful APIs, SDKs, and services to build applications with powerful cognitive features like image processing, vision detection, speech understanding. Similarly, you can enjoy the benefits of cognitive computing without a huge investment in developing your own AI, data science skills.
Cross-platform support:
The services support devices and platforms across Windows, iOS, and Android. Developers can spin off their applications with multiple programming languages including C#, Python, Java, Nodejs as well.
Utilize Azure undeniable strengths as a leading cloud platform. Furthermore, Azure strong cloud computing power couples with many integration services, for instance, built-in support for consuming cognitive services in Azure Data Lake Analytics. Of course, developers can easily integrate the technology into their own apps also via HTTP REST interfaces.
Security and Privacy:
You enjoy the same support as other Azure Services. Azure is leading with its strong cloud infrastructure and high availability. Moreover, despite using cloud platforms, Cognitive Services now follows other Azure services terms. Under the new terms, Cognitive Services customers own and can manage and delete their customer data with the exception of Bing Search Services.
Some Considerations
Availability:
only available over the web, so an Internet connection is required. However, as cloud adoption is growing. Internet connection shouldn’t become a drawback to the services.
Pricing:
for a complete business solution, you may need to consider different factors such as services calls number per month, fixed prices or price per hour. Moreover, to estimate and select a suitable pricing model, you can always consult with Microsoft partners like Nub8 to work out a plan.
Microsoft is proving itself constantly by offering top technology with accessibility, continuous support and enhancement. Now we have got an overview of the services, as a developer. As well as, you can quickly try out for free to spin off your own smart apps or as a business feeling interested in how to benefit from these prominent tools. Let’s contact us to build up your suitable solution.