Overview of Cognitive Services

Microsoft’s Azure offers a great deal of features and capabilities.  One of them is Cognitive Services, where users can access a variety of APIs to help mimic a human response.  Some features include converting text to spoken speech, speech to text, and even the equivalent human understanding of a spoken phrase.  These services are divided into 4 major categories, as seen below.  Please note “Computer Vision” and “Custom Vision” sound very similar but their capabilities are different, as outlined in the “Vision” section below.

 

Decision

1. Anomaly Detector: Identify potential problems in time series data.
2. Content Moderator: Detect potentially offensive or unwanted content.
3. Personalizer: Create rich, personalized experiences for every user.

 

Language

1. LUIS (Language Understanding Intelligent Service)
2. QnA Maker: Create a conversational question and answer layer over your data.
3. Text Analytics: Detect sentiment, key phrases, and named entities.
4. Translator: Detect and translate more than 90 supported languages.

 

Speech

1. Speech to Text: Transcribe audible speech into readable, searchable text.
2. Text to Speech: Convert text to lifelike speech for more natural interfaces.
3. Speech Translation: Integrate real-time speech translation into your apps.
4. Speaker Recognition: Identify and verify the people speaking based on audio.

 

Vision

1. Computer Vision: Analyze content in images.
1. OCR: Optical Character Recognition
2. Image Analysis: extracts visual features from images (objects, faces, adult content
3. Spatial Analysis: Analyzes the presence and movement of people on a video feed and produces events that other systems can respond to.

 

2. Custom Vision: Customize image recognition to fit your business needs.
1. Image Classification: applies label(s) to an image
2. Object Detection: returns coordinates in image where applied label(s) can be found.

Note: Model can be exported for use: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/custom-vision-service/export-your-model

 

3. Face: Detect and identify people and emotions in images.
4. Video Indexer: Analyze the visual and audio channels of a video, and index its content.
5. Form Recognizer: Extract text, key-value pairs and tables from documents.
6. Ink Recognizer: Recognize digital ink and handwriting, and pinpoint common shapes.