Book Image

Learning Microsoft Cognitive Services - Second Edition

By : Leif Larsen
Book Image

Learning Microsoft Cognitive Services - Second Edition

By: Leif Larsen

Overview of this book

Microsoft has revamped its Project Oxford to launch the all new Cognitive Services platform-a set of 30 APIs to add speech, vision, language, and knowledge capabilities to apps. This book will introduce you to 24 of the APIs released as part of Cognitive Services platform and show you how to leverage their capabilities. More importantly, you'll see how the power of these APIs can be combined to build real-world apps that have cognitive capabilities. The book is split into three sections: computer vision, speech recognition and language processing, and knowledge and search. You will be taken through the vision APIs at first as this is very visual, and not too complex. The next part revolves around speech and language, which are somewhat connected. The last part is about adding real-world intelligence to apps by connecting them to Knowledge and Search APIs. By the end of this book, you will be in a position to understand what Microsoft Cognitive Service can offer and how to use the different APIs.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Cognitive Services in action for fun and life-changing purposes


The best way to introduce Microsoft Cognitive Services is to see how it can be used in action. Microsoft, and others, has created a lot of example applications to show off its capabilities. Several may be seen as silly, such as the How-Old.net (http://how-old.net/) image analysis and the what if I were that person application. These applications have generated quite some buzz, and they show off some of the APIs in a good way.

The one demonstration that is truly inspiring, though, is the one featuring a visually impaired person. Talking computers inspired him to create an application to allow blind and visually impaired people to understand what is going on around them. The application has been built upon Microsoft Cognitive Services. It gives a good idea of how the APIs can be used to change the world, for the better. Before moving on, head over to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2mC-NUAmMk and take a peek into the world of Microsoft Cognitive Services.