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

Setting up a common core


Before we get into the details, we want to set ourselves up for success. At the time of writing, none of the Language APIs we will be covering have NuGet client packages. As such, we will need to call directly to the REST endpoints. Because of this, we will do some work beforehand, to make sure we get away with writing less code.

New project

We will not be adding the APIs to our smart house application. Go on and create a new project, using the MVVM template created in Chapter 1, Getting Started with Microsoft Cognitive Services:

  1. Go into the NuGet package manager and install Newtonsoft.Json. This will help us deserialize API responses and serialize request bodies.
  2. Right-click on References.
  3. In the Assemblies tab, select System.Web and System.Runtime.Serialization.
  4. Click OK.
  5. In the MainView.xaml file, add a TabControl element. All our additional views will be added as TabItems in the MainView.

Web requests

All the APIs follow the same patterns. They call on their respective...