What Is Azure Cognitive Services

What is Azure Cognitive Services

In this Azure tutorial, we will discuss What Is Azure Cognitive Services Along with this, we will also discuss a few other topics like Azure Cognitive Services, Benefits of Azure Cognitive Services, Why Azure Cognitive Services and we will also discuss How do I use Microsoft cognitive services API? Azure Cognitive Services Components and Azure Cognitive Services Pricing.

What is Azure Cognitive Services? Azure Cognitive service is one of the excellent services from Microsoft that helps the developers to implement the Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) without having the expertise in these areas. The developer just needs to call an API to implement the ability to see, hear, speak, search, etc. and accelerate the decision-making capability into your Applications.

What is Azure Cognitive Services

Well, here is an excellent service from Microsoft Azure. As we all know any services that help us to deal with Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) feature now are considered to be the boom in the Market. Azure Cognitive Services is one of them.

Azure Cognitive Services

Microsoft Azure Cognitive services provide a number of Azure APIs that help you with the ability to make it easy to enhance your applications in different areas like vision, speech, knowledge, search and language, etc. That provides you the ability to implement the AI features in these areas.

Anomaly Detector is the Azure Cognitive Services that helps you to quickly identify the problems with the help of an API call. This service helps you to identify the best detection model for your data to make sure that you should get a high accuracy result. Anomaly detection as an Artificial Intelligence (AI) service is only provided by Azure. You can able to customize this service and can able to deploy where you want.

  • Anomaly Detector provides a powerful engine that helps you to identify the best algorithm based on your scenarios.
  • The automatic detection feature of this service helps to get the solution for the problems easily with very little time.
  • You can able to customize this service easily based on your business needs.

Content Moderator is the tool that helps you to identify the problems very quickly.

  • It helps to quickly detect unwanted images.
  • It helps to quickly identify unwanted texts.
  • It has built-in review tools to provide you the best results.

Metrics Advisor is the part of the Azure Cognitive Services which is built based on the Anomaly Detector that helps you to monitor the growth engines of your organization that indeed helps you to easily identify and fix the problems very quickly. This provides you the alerting facility.

Personaliser is one of the services that you can use with no machine learning expertise that helps you to priorities the relevant content and layouts with the help of the API.

Benefits of Azure Cognitive Services

Here, we will discuss the Key Benefits of Azure Cognitive services.

  • Azure Cognitive Services provides you the best Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities based on your Domain.
  • Azure Cognitive Services helps to achieve human parity in computer vision, speech, and language, etc.
  • Provides the flexibility to deploy the Azure Cognitive Services anywhere from the cloud with the help of the containers.
  • You can able to use the Azure Cognitive Services and can implement easily without any expertise in the machine-learning area.

Why Azure Cognitive Services

Overall, if you will see, You can able to build many interactive apps using these Azure Cognitive Services APIs in order to provide excellent services to the users. It is altogether a different experience for the users. It helps the developers also to create different engaging and interactive apps with fewer lines of codes. Developer mostly needs to call the API which made the developer’s job easy. Let’s discuss Why Azure Cognitive Services?

1- Vision

If you have the requirement to integrate the vision detection features, want to detect the different landmarks, images, labels, etc then in these cases, you can easily integrate these features to your application, simply by calling different APIs.

These tools come with different features that are Emotion, Face, Video, Content moderator, Video Indexer, etc. These features really help the developers to analyze the content and provides the solution quickly. It also helps to identify inappropriate content easily.

Face

The Vision API can help to recognize the faces in different pictures that can help the developers to work on different applications like face detection, face identification, emotion recognition, face grouping, etc. Less headache for the developers and they can easily get the Output with fewer efforts and less time.

Content moderator

The content moderator is a human review tool that helps to quickly detect unwanted images, unwanted texts, etc to provide you the best results.

Video Indexer

Video Indexer is another category of Vision API that helps the developers to analyze the video properly and work on different applications like brand detection, auto language detection, etc. That helps the developers to save a lot of time and effort. Also, helps the developers to fix the different issues in the Videos.

2- Speech

With the help of the Azure Cognitive Services, If you want to integrate the speech processing features into your applications or services, you can able to integrate those easily to your Applications. You can able to use these APIs in different cases like Speech Translation, Speech Recognition, Speech to Text, etc.

Speech Translation

This one of the Speech API that helps the developers to add different categories of translations to their apps. As of now, this API helps you to translate more than 10 languages. The intension here is, at the end of the day, the End-user should understand the translation.

Speech Recognition

It helps the developers to implement the verification mechanism in the applications to ensure that the person working on the application is the right person in terms of the security reason. It plays an interesting role to identify the user. It actually identifies some words how the user speaks and then saves those words for future reference.

Speech to Text

With the help of the API, you can able to implement the features in your applications that can help you convert the speech to text. You can able to implement this with the help of different languages. You can implement different applications like speech transcription, speech recognition, etc.

Text to Speech

This API also helps to develop different applications that help the developers to easily implement the feature to convert the texts to audio for different languages. Supports around 45 languages as of now. It can also help to select the male and female versions of voices by analyzing the way of speaking, speed, tone, pronunciation, etc. This is really interesting and saves lots of coding effort and time for the developers.

3- Language

With the help of Azure Cognitive Services APIs, the developers can build different applications that can understand different categories of text including the unstructured one. This is another interesting feature of the Azure Cognitive Services APIs. With the help of this API, you can able to integrate different features in the applications like Language Understanding, Text Analytics, Translator Text, etc

Language Understanding

The intention here is to build an application in such a way that it should understand the language of the user. So here is the Opportunity, the Language Understanding API helps the developers to implement this scenario easily with less coding effortless time.

Text Analytics

Azure cognitive services text analytics API helps the developers to develop different application features like language detection, keyphrase extraction, etc. It extracts the information from the texts to understand the user’s language in a better way.

Translator Text

This is an excellent API that helps the developers to translate the texts easily and implement that in different applications. Language detection can be done automatically with the help of the text string.

4. Search

Search is such an excellent feature to implement in your application. Everybody wants the search feature to be implemented in their applications. Azure Cognitive Services helps with some APIs related to the search functionality that helps the developers to implement the search functionality in different applications with just the API call and less coding effort.

Search functionality helps the users to get the desired result with less time while searching from billions of websites.

There are different APIs related to search functionality. Those are Bing Custom Search, Bing Web Search, Bing Video Search, Bing News Search

Bing Custom Search

Once you can customize the search based on your specific requirement. You can get the result immediately. It is very much powerful, dynamic. So basically with the help of this API, you can configure a custom search engine.

Bing Web Search

Bing Web Search API can help you to get fresh results through the web search. This is an excellent search API that really helps you to get the search result quicker.

Bing Video Search

Bing Video Search is a very powerful API that provides you a list of relevant videos once you will search for a specific video. This has a very Powerful mechanism to give the result within a span of time. The video search API uses API keys for authentication.

Bing News Search

With the help of the Bing News Search API, you can search for news related and other relevant videos immediately and you will get the result with less time once you will search for that.  

How do I use Microsoft cognitive services API?

Well, now we have some idea about Azure Cognitive Services. Here we will discuss How do I use Microsoft cognitive services API?

Before starting the exact process, we should know what is the prerequisites for using the Azure Cognitive Services.

Make sure, you have an Azure Account or Azure Subscription before starting. If you don’t have an Azure Account, Create a free Azure Account now.

Assuming you have an Azure Account now, Let’s discuss the process in detail

Login to the Azure Portal (https://portal.azure.com/)

Once you logged in to the Azure Portal, search for the Cognitive Services. Then click on the search result as shown below

How to use Azure Cognitive Services

For the same option, you can also click on the + Create a resource from the left navigation and search for the Cognitive Services. Then click on the search result as shown below

How do I use Microsoft cognitive services API

The next step is, click on the Create button from the below window.

How to use Microsoft cognitive services API

On the Create Cognitive services window, Provide the below details

  • Subscription: Choose the valid subscription that you want to use here.
  • Resource Group: You need to choose your existing Resource Group here. If you don’t have an existing Resource Group then you can create a new Resource Group by clicking on the Create new link.
  • Region: You need to provide the Region for your Azure Resource.
  • Name: Provide a unique name for your Azure Cognitive Services.
  • Pricing tier: Select the Pricing tier based on your business need. You can click on the View full pricing details link to verify the pricing details for your reference.
  • Select those two checkboxes to accept the terms and conditions.

Finally click on the Review + Create button as highlighted below.

How to Use Cognitive Services

On the next window, it will validate all the information entered by you on the above window, and then it will show you the Validation Passed message then You can able to see the Create button is enabled as shown below. Now verify the details entered by you again and then click on the Create button to create the Azure Cognitive Services.

How to create Cognitive Services using Azure Portal

This is How do I use Microsoft cognitive services API using the above steps.

Azure Cognitive Services Components

Cognitive Services APIs can be divided into five distinct components based on the area of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) they touch.

Those areas below, We have already discussed all the components above, You can refer to the above sections to find the components in details.

  • Decision
  • Language
  • Speech
  • Vision
  • Web search
Azure Cognitive Services Components

Azure Cognitive Services Pricing

Well, here we will discuss on the Azure Cognitive Services Pricing details. One of the best things with the Azure Cognitive Services is also that the pricing model is based on the Pay only for what you use model.

Vision: (Computer Vision, Face and Content Moderator Services )

The pricing details in this case as per Microsoft is as follows

Product DetailsFeatures DetailsPrice Ranges
Computer Vision S1
up to 10 requests / second
Face
Tag Details
Color
Image Type
You need to pay ₹66.097 per 1,000 transactions in case of 0-1M transactions
You need to pay ₹52.877 per 1,000 transactions in case of 1M-5M transactions
You need to pay ₹42.963 per 1,000 transactions in case of 5M-10M transactions
You need to pay ₹42.963 per 1,000 transactions in case of 10M-100M transactions
You need to pay ₹42.963 per 1,000 transactions in case of 100M+ transactions 
Adult
Landmark
OCR
Brand
You need to pay ₹99.145 per 1,000 transactions in case of 0-1M transactions
 You need to pay ₹66.097 per 1,000 transactions in case of 1M-5M transactions 
You need to pay ₹42.963 per 1,000 transactions in case of 5M-10M transactions
You need to pay ₹42.963 per 1,000 transactions in the case of 10M-100M transactions
You need to pay ₹42.963 per 1,000 transactions in the case of 100M+ transactions
Recognise Text
Read
You need to pay ₹165.241 per 1,000 transactions
Content Moderator S0
up to 10 requests / second
Moderate, ReviewYou need to pay ₹66.097 per 1,000 transactions in the case of 0-1M transactions
You need to pay ₹49.573 per 1,000 transactions in the case of 1M-5M transactions
You need to pay ₹39.658 per 1,000 transactions in the case of 5M-10M transactions
You need to pay ₹26.439 per 1,000 transactions in the case of 10M+ transactions
Face Standard
up to 10 requests/second
Face Verification
Face Identification
Similar Face Search
Face Grouping
You need to pay ₹66.097 per 1,000 transactions in the case of 0-1M transactions 
You need to pay ₹52.877 per 1,000 transactions in the case of 1M-5M transactions
You need to pay ₹39.658 per 1,000 transactions in the case of 5M-100M transactions
You need to pay ₹26.439 per 1,000 transactions in case of 100M+ transactions
Face StoragePer month, you need to pay ₹0.661 per 1,000 faces.

There is a different price based on the Specific API. For more details on the Price for Azure Cognitive Services, You can check out here.

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Wrapping Up

Well, in this article, we discussed Azure Cognitive Services, we also discussed a few other topics like What is Azure Cognitive Services, Benefits of Azure Cognitive Services, Why Azure Cognitive Services and we also discussed How do I use Microsoft cognitive services API? Azure Cognitive Services Components and Azure Cognitive Services Pricing. Hope you have enjoyed this Article !!!