What is Microsoft Azure?

Microsoft Azure is a collection of integrated Cloud Services - analytics, intelligent, computing, database, mobile, networking, storage and Web to move faster, achieve more and save money.

Introduction Microsoft Cognitive Services

Microsoft Cognitive Services (formerly Project Oxford) is a collection of APIs that enables natural and contextual interaction with tools that augment users' experiences via the power of machine learned models from Microsoft. Microsoft Cognitive Services expands on Microsoft’s evolving portfolio of machine learning APIs and enables developers to easily add intelligent features - such as emotion and video detection; facial, speech and vision recognition, speech and language understanding - into their Applications.

Cognitive Services helps you to build apps with powerful algorithms, using just a few lines of code. These Services work across the devices and platforms such as iOS, Android and Windows, keep improving and are easy to set up.

Advantages of Cognitive Services

  • No upfront cost in Cognitive Service.
  • No termination fees.
  • Pay only for what you use.
  • Per Minute Billing.

Currently, an Azure supports Cognitive Services preview in an Azure portal.

APIs, given below are available under Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services-
Vision

From faces to feelings, APIs allow our apps to understand an image and video content.

  • Face API
    Detect, analyze, organize and tag faces in photos.

  • Emotion API
    Personalize the user experiences with emotion recognition.

  • Computer Vision API
    Distill actionable information from the images.

Speech

Hear and speak to our users with APIs that filters noise, identify the speakers and more.

  • Bing Speech API
    Converts speech to text and back again to understand user intent.

  • Speaker Recognition API
    Use speech to identify and authenticate the individual speakers.

Language

APIs allow our app to process the natural language and learn how to recognize what users want.

  • Language Understanding Intelligent Service
    Teach your apps to understand the commands from your users.

  • Text Analytics API
    Easily evaluate the sentiment and topics to understand what users want.

  • Web Language Model API
    Use the power of the predictive language models trained on Web-scale data.

  • Bing Spell Check API
    Detect and correct the spelling mistakes in your app.
Knowledge

Tap into rich knowledge amassed from the Web, academia, or our own data.

  • Recommendations API
    Predict and recommend items, which your customers want.

  • Academic Knowledge API
    Tap into the wealth of the academic content in the Microsoft Academic Graph.

Search

Make your apps more intelligent with the power of Bing APIs. A single call accesses data from billions of Web pages, images, videos and news.

  • Bing Search APIs
    Web, image, video and news search APIs for your app.

  • Bing Autosuggest API
    Give your app intelligent autosuggest options for searches.
Example Applications for Microsoft Cognitive Service
  1. Uber uses Face API for security
    Uber is using driver selfies to enhance the security, powered by Microsoft Cognitive Services.

  2. CaptionBot.ai
    CaptionBot.ai Website uses Computer Vision and Natural Language to describe the contents of images.

Cognitive Services Pricing

The website, given below, is used to find Cognitive Services API Pricing per transaction.


Summary

In this article, we discussed Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services.