AI is a hot topic at the moment, with one of Microsoft’s translation services achieving near-human accuracy translating from Chinese to English. Facial recognition, another expanding field, is forecast to grow by over 20% this year.

These are just two of the many examples of the uses of AI. At the rate AI innovation and implementation is growing, it can be hard to keep up with new developments.

Azure Cognitive Services has effectively democratized these and other forms of artificial intelligence for the technical and developer community. In this blog post, we’ll introduce a set of these services. Specifically, we’ll take a closer look at three of the Azure Vision Services’ APIs: the Computer Vision API, the Custom Vision API, and the Form Recognizer, to see how they can be used to produce actionable insights on image-related content such as identifying objects and people and in photographs.

What Is Azure Cognitive Services?

Azure Cognitive Services is a comprehensive family of AI services that helps you build intelligent software applications. No machine machine-learning expertise is required to use them; an API call alone can embed AI capabilities into your existing applications.

Azure Cognitive Services includes 30 APIs that belong to the following categories:

Decision APIs—Help you to make decisions faster, detect anomalies, or moderate content

Vision APIs—Assist you in identifying and analyzing content in images, videos, and digital ink

Speech APIs—Integrate speech processing into apps (e.g., speech to text)

Search APIs—Give you the power of BING in a box

Language APIs—Allow you to easily infuse natural language processing, text analytics, and technology into chatbot development

Azure Cognitive Services can be deployed anywhere in the cloud, and, if data privacy is a concern, containers can be used to give you total flexibility and control over API consumption.

How Are Azure Cognitive Services Consumed?

The consumption of Azure Cognitive Services has been standardized. It typically involves the following steps:

Provision the Cognitive Service in the Microsoft Azure Portal. Take note of the API key. Build a REST request with the required parameters. Invoke the request and parse the API response.

It’s that easy. In the screenshot below, an API call is being made to the Text Analytics API using Postman: