Building Solutions with the Microsoft Power Platform

Chapter 12. Power Automate and Azure Cognitive Services

Prior to the AI capabilities made available to the Power Platform via AI Builder and Power Virtual Agents, Microsoft introduced Azure Cognitive Services. Azure Cognitive Services gave developers a simple way to introduce AI into their solutions without needing to understand the complexities behind creating intelligent services. These services are divided into several categories: Speech, Language, Vision, Decision, and OpenAPI.

The Speech services, for example, allow you to perform tasks like transcribing speech to text, converting text to speech, and speech translation. The Language services can identify terms in text or provide a sentiment score to help you gauge whether a statement is positive or negative, among other things. The Vision services include Computer Vision, which lets you analyze images and videos, and a Face API that can detect people in images, identify the emotions seen in their faces, and more. These services are constantly changing and evolving, and while many of the capabilities available are in tools like AI Builder, there are times when you may want to use Azure Cognitive Services instead. For example, if you do not have an AI Builder license but your organization has set up one or more of the cognitive services, you can still leverage those solutions in Power Automate.

In the next section, we’ll take a high-level look at what’s involved in setting up these services, including certain privileges you’ll ...