Overview of Azure Cognitive Services

Azure Cognitive Services provide cloud-based AI algorithms that can be used to build intelligent applications without requiring machine learning expertise. These services are delivered via REST APIs and SDKs, making them accessible to developers of all skill levels.

Vision

Analyze images and videos to extract insights, recognize objects, detect faces, and understand content.

Computer Vision

Extract text, detect objects, recognize brands, and analyze faces from images.

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Face API

Detect, recognize, and analyze human faces in images.

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Form Recognizer

Extract text, key-value pairs, and table data from documents.

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Speech

Enable voice interaction in your applications with speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and speech translation.

Speech to Text

Convert spoken audio into text for transcription and analysis.

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Text to Speech

Generate natural-sounding human speech from text.

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Speech Translation

Translate speech in real-time between multiple languages.

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Language

Understand and process natural language for tasks like sentiment analysis, entity recognition, and language detection.

Text Analytics

Perform sentiment analysis, key phrase extraction, entity recognition, and language detection.

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Language Understanding (LUIS)

Build custom natural language understanding models for your applications.

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Translator Text API

Translate text between a wide range of languages.

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Decision

Leverage AI to make intelligent recommendations and detect anomalies.

Anomaly Detector

Identify potential issues and unexpected patterns in time-series data.

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Content Moderator

Detect potentially offensive or unwanted content in text and images.

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Getting Started with Cognitive Services

To begin using Azure Cognitive Services, you'll need an Azure subscription. You can create a free account to get started.

  1. Create an Azure Account: Visit azure.microsoft.com/free/
  2. Create a Cognitive Services Resource: In the Azure portal, create a new Cognitive Services resource and select the desired services.
  3. Obtain API Keys and Endpoint: Once your resource is created, you will receive an API key and endpoint to authenticate your requests.
  4. Integrate with SDKs or REST APIs: Use the provided SDKs for your preferred programming language or make direct REST API calls.

Example: Using the Computer Vision API (Conceptual)

Here's a simplified example of how you might call the Computer Vision API to analyze an image:


curl -X POST "https://<your-endpoint>/vision/v1.0/analyze?visualFeatures=Categories,Description" \
-H "Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key: <your-subscription-key>" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
--data-urlencode 'url=https://www.example.com/images/sample.jpg'

This request would return JSON data describing the categories and a caption for the image.