Book Image

Practical Guide to Azure Cognitive Services

By : Chris Seferlis, Christopher Nellis, Andy Roberts
Book Image

Practical Guide to Azure Cognitive Services

By: Chris Seferlis, Christopher Nellis, Andy Roberts

Overview of this book

Azure Cognitive Services and OpenAI are a set of pre-built artificial intelligence (AI) solution APIs that can be leveraged from existing applications, allowing customers to take advantage of Microsoft’s award-winning Vision, Speech, Text, Decision, and GPT-4 AI capabilities. With Practical Guide to Azure Cognitive Services, you’ll work through industry-specific examples of implementations to get a head-start in your production journey. You’ll begin with an overview of the categorization of Azure Cognitive Services and the benefits of embracing AI solutions for practical business applications. After that, you’ll explore the benefits of using Azure Cognitive Services to optimize efficiency and improve predictive capabilities. Then, you’ll learn how to leverage Vision capabilities for quality control, Form Recognizer to streamline supply chain nuances, language understanding to improve customer service, and Cognitive Search for next-generation knowledge-mining solutions. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to implement various Cognitive Services solutions that will help you enhance efficiency, reduce costs, and improve the customer experience at your organization. You’ll also be well equipped to automate mundane tasks by reaping the full potential of OpenAI.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Part 1: Ocean Smart – an AI Success Story
5
Part 2: Deploying Next-Generation Knowledge Mining Solutions with Azure Cognitive Search
10
Part 3: Other Cognitive Services That Will Help Your Company Optimize Operations

Reviewing past and future investments

With the explosion of AI among enterprises, Microsoft's investment in their Cognitive Services suite started back in 2015 with Project Oxford. At the Microsoft Build conference (typically targeted at developers) that year, it was announced that this new set of ML-based REpresentational State Transfer (REST) API and SDK tools were being built. There have been many directional changes and iterations of deployments, but the majority of the services released back then are still being used today. The only major difference is the approach to Face APIs, as discussed briefly in the last section.

Updates

Microsoft maintains a blog for notable changes to Azure and tags articles based on technology. Cognitive Services-specific articles are tagged and can be found here in their complete form: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/topics/cognitive-services.

Later on, the Azure updates blog was announced and articles about new services and features...