AI Services: Cognitive Services

Introduction

With the increasing complexity of everyday applications, there has been an increased demand for building innovative applications exhibiting human-similar capabilities. These scenarios include applications that need to understand voice commands (like Apple’s Siri) or even recognize particular objects in an image. These abilities are often called cognitive abilities.

Building such functionality requires non-trivial know-how in AI (artificial intelligence). Unfortunately, these skills are outside the typical developer’s skillset. Luckily, Microsoft Azure provides cloud-based AI services that help us inject cognitive ability into our application without any AI skill. These services are called Azure Cognitive services, enabling us to add hearing, speaking, and analysis functionalities to our applications.