Building Intelligent Apps with Cognitive APIs

Chapter 3. Understanding Azure Cognitive Services

Azure Cognitive Services are designed to be productive, enterprise-ready, and trusted. They make it possible for you to build on the latest breakthroughs in AI without building and deploying your own models.

The Cognitive Services portfolio is growing fast, and services are currently grouped into five categories: Vision, Speech, Language, Decision, and Web Search. We have organized this report around these groupings, but when you are building your own app, you are likely to use several services together across multiple categories. There are no restrictions on calling different services together.

You can use Cognitive Services whether you’re building traditional apps or taking the low-code approach. If you’re writing serverless code, you can call services to process events. For example, you can use Microsoft Flow and the Language Understanding service to create automation that will schedule a meeting whenever you receive a text that says something like “set up a meeting.” You can also build the insights from these services into your Power BI dashboards for more informative and predictive reports.

To get started, each Cognitive Service offers a free seven-day trial, or you can create an Azure account to get higher quotas and a longer trial (you get $200 in credits if you’re new to Azure).

If you’re building your own machine learning systems, operationalizing them for use in production can take as long as—or longer than—developing ...