Welcome to Azure Cognitive Services Documentation

Azure Cognitive Services provides a set of REST APIs and SDKs that enable developers to easily add cognitive intelligence into their applications without requiring machine learning expertise. These services cover a broad range of capabilities, from vision and speech to language understanding and decision support.

This documentation will guide you through understanding, using, and integrating these powerful services into your solutions.

Key Capabilities:

  • Vision: Analyze images and videos to detect objects, faces, read text, and more.
  • Speech: Convert spoken audio to text, and text to natural-sounding speech.
  • Language: Understand and process human language, including sentiment analysis, key phrase extraction, and entity recognition.
  • Decision: Leverage machine learning to detect anomalies, provide recommendations, and personalize user experiences.

Vision Services

The Vision services empower your applications to "see" and interpret the visual world. This includes:

  • Computer Vision: Extracting rich information from images, such as tags, descriptions, and celebrities.
  • Face API: Detecting, verifying, and identifying faces in images.
  • Form Recognizer: Extracting text and structured data from documents and forms.
  • Custom Vision: Training your own custom image classification and object detection models.

Example: Analyzing an image with Computer Vision

API Endpoint:

POST https://[your-endpoint]/vision/v3.2/analyze?visualFeatures=Categories,Description,Faces&language=en

Request Body (JSON):

{
    "url": "https://example.com/images/people.jpg"
}

This request analyzes an image to detect categories, provide a description, and identify faces. The response will contain structured JSON data detailing these findings.

Speech Services

Transform audio into actionable insights and natural communication with Speech Services.

  • Speech to Text: Real-time and batch transcription of audio.
  • Text to Speech: Generating human-like speech from text in various languages and voices.
  • Speech Translation: Translating spoken language in real-time.
  • Speaker Recognition: Identifying and verifying speakers.

Language Services

Understand the nuances of human language to build more intelligent conversational experiences.

  • Text Analytics: Sentiment analysis, key phrase extraction, entity recognition, and language detection.
  • Language Understanding (LUIS): Creating custom natural language models for chatbots and conversational interfaces.
  • Translator: Translating text between a wide range of languages.
  • Question Answering: Building knowledge bases to answer user questions.

Decision Services

Make smarter business decisions with AI-powered insights.

  • Anomaly Detector: Identifying unusual patterns in time-series data.
  • Content Moderator: Moderating text, images, and videos to detect inappropriate content.
  • Personalizer: Delivering personalized experiences to users.

Getting Started

To begin using Azure Cognitive Services:

  1. Create an Azure Account: If you don't have one, sign up for a free Azure account.
  2. Create a Cognitive Services Resource: In the Azure portal, create a new Cognitive Services resource. You can choose a specific service or a multi-service resource.
  3. Obtain Keys and Endpoint: Once created, you'll get API keys and an endpoint URL, which are required to authenticate your requests.
  4. Explore SDKs and REST APIs: Choose your preferred programming language and start integrating the services.

Refer to the official Azure documentation for detailed quickstarts and tutorials.

Pricing

Azure Cognitive Services offers a pay-as-you-go pricing model. Many services include a free tier for experimentation and development. For detailed pricing information, please visit the Azure Cognitive Services pricing page.