Practical Guide to Azure Cognitive Services

Practical Guide to Azure Cognitive Services

by Chris Seferlis, Christopher Nellis, Andy Roberts
Released May 2023
Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
ISBN: 9781801812917

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Book description

Streamline your complex processes and optimize your organization's operational efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and customer experience by unlocking the potential of Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services and OpenAI Purchase of the print or Kindle book includes a free PDF eBook

Key Features

  • Minimize costs and maximize operations by automating mundane activities using AI tools
  • Ideate solutions using real-world examples for manufacturing process improvement with AI
  • Master TCO and ROI analysis for implementing AI solutions, automating operations, and ideating innovative manufacturing solutions with real-world examples

Book Description

Azure Cognitive Services and OpenAI are a set of pre-built artificial intelligence (AI) solution APIs that can be leveraged from existing applications, allowing customers to take advantage of Microsoft’s award-winning Vision, Speech, Text, Decision, and GPT-4 AI capabilities.

With Practical Guide to Azure Cognitive Services, you’ll work through industry-specific examples of implementations to get a head-start in your production journey. You’ll begin with an overview of the categorization of Azure Cognitive Services and the benefits of embracing AI solutions for practical business applications. After that, you’ll explore the benefits of using Azure Cognitive Services to optimize efficiency and improve predictive capabilities. Then, you’ll learn how to leverage Vision capabilities for quality control, Form Recognizer to streamline supply chain nuances, language understanding to improve customer service, and Cognitive Search for next-generation knowledge-mining solutions.

By the end of this book, you’ll be able to implement various Cognitive Services solutions that will help you enhance efficiency, reduce costs, and improve the customer experience at your organization. You’ll also be well equipped to automate mundane tasks by reaping the full potential of OpenAI.

What you will learn

  • Master cost-effective deployment of Azure Cognitive Services
  • Develop proven solutions from an architecture and development standpoint
  • Understand how Cognitive Services are deployed and customized
  • Evaluate various uses of Cognitive Services with different mediums
  • Disseminate Azure costs for Cognitive Services workloads smoothly
  • Deploy next-generation Knowledge Mining solutions with Cognitive Search
  • Explore the current and future journey of OpenAI
  • Understand the value proposition of different AI projects

Who this book is for

This book is for data scientists, technology leaders, and software engineers looking to implement Azure Cognitive Services with the help of sample use cases derived from success stories. Experience with Python as well as an overall understanding of the Azure Portal with related services such as Azure Data Lake Storage and Azure Functions will help you make the most of this book.

Table of contents

  1. Practical Guide to Azure Cognitive Services
  2. Contributors
  3. About the authors
  4. About the reviewer
  5. Preface
    1. Who is this book for?
    2. What this book covers
    3. To get the most out of this book
    4. Download the example code files
    5. Conventions used
    6. Get in touch
    7. Reviews
    8. Share Your Thoughts
    9. Download a free PDF copy of this book
  6. Part 1: Ocean Smart – an AI Success Story
  7. Chapter 1: How Azure AI Changed Ocean Smart
    1. Choosing Azure Cognitive Services
    2. The Ocean Smart story
      1. Dealing with paperwork using Knowledge Mining
      2. Using Form Recognizer to process financial documents
      3. Using Anomaly Detector for discovering abnormalities
      4. Using Computer Vision to detect product quality issues early
      5. Applying Content Moderator to avoid the posting of inappropriate material
      6. Using the Personalizer service for product recommendations
      7. Applying Speech services for call center improvements
    3. Building your case: calculating ROI and TCO
      1. Building your justification
      2. Proving out your solution
    4. Summary
  8. Chapter 2: Why Azure Cognitive Services?
    1. Exploring the history of Azure Cognitive Services
    2. Exploring Azure Cognitive Services
      1. Decision
      2. Speech
      3. Language
      4. Vision
    3. Reviewing past and future investments
      1. Accessibility
      2. Sustainability
      3. Operational efficiencies
    4. Summary
  9. Chapter 3: Architectural and Cost Optimization Considerations
    1. Exploring core Azure services and costs
      1. Storage accounts
      2. Azure Virtual Network (VNet)
      3. Network Security Groups
      4. Databases
      5. Azure App Service
      6. Azure Functions
    2. Estimating the costs for a proof-of-concept solution, including all services
    3. Understanding data orchestration for loading data into Azure
    4. Summary
  10. Part 2: Deploying Next-Generation Knowledge Mining Solutions with Azure Cognitive Search
  11. Chapter 4: Deriving Value from Knowledge Mining Solutions in Azure
    1. Reviewing a brief history of document collection solutions
    2. Understanding the drawbacks of traditional data collection systems
    3. Exploring the purpose and benefits of knowledge mining solutions
    4. Using cognitive services to develop knowledge mining solutions
    5. Summary
    6. Further reading
  12. Chapter 5: Azure Cognitive Search Overview and Implementation
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Understanding how Azure Cognitive Search is built
      1. Search types
      2. Underlying index and search activities
    3. Exploring what services will be used as part of a Cognitive Search solution
    4. Pairing common services with Cognitive Search for your KM solution
    5. Summary
  13. Chapter 6: Exploring Further Azure Cognitive Services for Successful KM Solutions
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Exploring native AI enrichments in Azure Cognitive Search
    3. Reviewing advancements in OCR and image recognition
      1. Understanding OCR enhancements
      2. Exploring image recognition enhancements
    4. Considering other cognitive services commonly used in KM
      1. Skills arrays
      2. Custom skills
    5. Adding additional skills to your Cognitive Search indexer
    6. Summary
  14. Chapter 7: Pulling It All Together for a Complete KM Solution
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Getting your Azure environment set up to support your KM solution
    3. Deploying the Azure Cognitive Search service
      1. Azure storage account deployment
      2. Deploying Cognitive Search for your KM solution
    4. Ingesting your data for indexing and related activities
      1. Azure Speech-to-Text for audio transcription
      2. Loading files in Form Recognizer for processing
      3. Bulk loading of everything else
      4. Connecting to and deploying related services
      5. Batch processing audio files with Cognitive Speech
    5. Deploying the KM solution with monitoring and notification considerations
      1. Showing the code
    6. Summary
  15. Part 3: Other Cognitive Services That Will Help Your Company Optimize Operations
  16. Chapter 8: Decluttering Paperwork with Form Recognizer
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Understanding Form Recognizer machine learning model options
      1. Building custom models
    3. Using Form Recognizer Development Studio
    4. Exploring the AP process at Ocean Smart
    5. Deploying Form Recognizer for mostly automating the AP process
      1. Creating Azure resources
      2. Deploying Azure App Service
    6. Integrating the complete solution for production use
      1. Building the demonstration
      2. Example code
    7. Summary
  17. Chapter 9: Identifying Problems with Anomaly Detector
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Overview of the Anomaly Detector service
      1. Univariate Anomaly Detector
      2. Multivariate Anomaly Detector
    3. Using the Anomaly Detector algorithms with your data
      1. Async API
      2. Sync API
    4. Configuring and refining monitoring of data in your environment
    5. Defining and detecting anomalies in your organization
    6. Building the complete solution in Azure
      1. The SimulateChillerEvents function
      2. The ProcessChillerEvents function
      3. The Azure Stream Analytics job
    7. Summary
  18. Chapter 10: Streamlining the Quality Control Process with Custom Vision
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Understanding the quality control process at Ocean Smart
    3. Evolving the quality control process with Custom Vision
    4. Training and improving the model
      1. Creating your first project
      2. Uploading and tagging images
      3. Model training
      4. Model performance
    5. Using Smart Labeler for faster image labeling
    6. Sending a notification of an irregular product
    7. Building the complete Custom Vision solution
      1. The processNewImage function
      2. The TrainNewModel function
      3. The PublishLatestIteration function
      4. Deploying the functions
      5. Using the Ocean Smart portal
    8. Summary
  19. Chapter 11: Deploying a Content Moderator
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Overview of the Content Moderator service
      1. Pricing considerations when deploying the service
    3. Applying the service to text moderation
      1. Using a custom text list
    4. Applying the service to image moderation
    5. Applying the service to video moderation
    6. Flagging and reviewing inappropriate content
    7. Building the complete solution
    8. Summary
  20. Chapter 12: Using Personalizer to Cater to Your Audience
    1. Technical requirements
    2. The Personalizer service and its origins
    3. Receiving and scoring consumer feedback
    4. Using Reinforcement Learning for recommendations
    5. Configuring Content, Actions, and Context to make recommendations
    6. Using evaluations to increase the effectiveness of your Personalized Service
    7. Building a completed solution
      1. Data used for this example
      2. RewardAction
      3. Testing and deploying the functions
      4. Using a test script
    8. Summary
  21. Chapter 13: Improving Customer Experience with Speech to Text
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Overview of Azure Speech services
    3. Working with real-time audio and batch speech-to-text data
      1. Real-time speech-to-text
      2. Batch speech-to-text
    4. Improving speech-to-text accuracy with Custom Speech
    5. Working with different languages
      1. Using the translation services
    6. Building a complete batch solution
      1. TranscribeAudio function
      2. Retrieve transcription results Logic Apps app
      3. Failed transcription result
      4. Successful transcription results
      5. Capturing sentiment and reporting
    7. Summary
  22. Chapter 14: Using Language Services in Chat Bots and Beyond
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Using a chat bot for enhanced customer service
    3. Tying the Cognitive Service for Language to the chat bot for NLP
    4. Using the translator services for worldwide solutions
    5. Advanced capabilities of Language Understanding
      1. Orchestration workflow
      2. Question answering
      3. None intents
    6. Building a bot using language Understanding
      1. Creating our bot project
      2. A quick tour of Bot Framework Composer
      3. Adding the check my order flow
      4. Allowing a user to add shipping notes – language translation
    7. Summary
  23. Chapter 15: Surveying Our Progress
    1. Highlighting recent advancements in AI
    2. The lessons learned and returns on investments
      1. Industry ripples
    3. Evaluating future opportunities for optimization
      1. The ethics of AI
    4. Summary
  24. Chapter 16: Appendix – Azure OpenAI Overview
    1. Reviewing industry trends
    2. Understanding what Azure OpenAI services are
    3. Clarifying common misconceptions
    4. Summary
  25. Index
    1. Why subscribe?
  26. Other Books You May Enjoy
    1. Packt is searching for authors like you
    2. Share Your Thoughts
    3. Download a free PDF copy of this book

Product information

  • Title: Practical Guide to Azure Cognitive Services
  • Author(s): Chris Seferlis, Christopher Nellis, Andy Roberts
  • Release date: May 2023
  • Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
  • ISBN: 9781801812917