Azure Cognitive Services – Introduction

During these rapidly changing times, one thing’s for sure: Artificial Intelligence is rising. Robots may not take over the world anytime soon, but they can definitely help us create smarter solutions for our customers. Today, we are going to start a journey in Cloud-based Artificial Intelligence.

Azure Cognitive Services

Why would you need AI in the cloud? Why would you need AI at all? Well, AI allows you to accomplish a lot of complex tasks. For example, your applications can use AI to understand speech, read text from images, make predictions, or even detect objects in videos. Such tasks are not purely algorithmic, and it’s a ton of work to do them from scratch. That’s why Microsoft developed the Azure Cognitive Services: a set of programming interfaces that allow you to interact with AI brains that run over the Azure cloud platform.

The process is straightforward. Let’s say you want to identify objects present in a picture (e.g., people, laptops, phones, furniture, you-name-it). All you need to do is feed the image to the remote service, and Azure shall provide you with a list of detected results, including their names and coordinates. Azure is doing the heavy lifting so that you can focus on the development of your application instead.

As you can see below, Azure Cognitive Services include a plethora of ready-to-use APIs to add AI capabilities to your projects. Most importantly, you can add AI functionality to your applications without any prior Machine Learning knowledge!

Computer Vision

In this article, we will create a simple Computer Vision service capable of detecting objects in images. In the next articles, I’ll show you how to use this service from desktop and mobile applications. The Azure Computer Vision APIs support the following operations:

Throughout this article, I will explain step by step how to create a new Computer Vision API and acquire its credentials.

Creating a new Computer Vision API

First things first. To use all of the Azure goodies, you need a Microsoft Azure account. It’s free. After you log in to your account, you should see the Azure Portal homepage.

Then, click the menu icon and select the Dashboard item. From there, go to the Marketplace.

The Marketplace is a store that allows you to easily extend your cloud account with new features. Under AI + Machine Learning, select Computer Vision.

Then, click Create.

This will navigate you to the Create Computer Vision page.

There, you need to create a new resource group by clicking the Create new option, typing a name, and selecting the OK button. Also, select a region, type a name for your API, and select the appropriate pricing tier for your needs.

At the moment, there are two available pricing tiers:

1. Free F0 (20 calls per minute, 5K calls per month)
2. Standard S1 (10 calls per second)

During the development stage of your project, I would recommend selecting the free tier. You can easily change the pricing tier after you create your API.

After configuring all the options, click the Review + Create button. You will navigate to the corresponding tab and you will see the Validation Passed notification. Review your selected options and the Terms and then click the Create button.

The following notification informs you about the deployment progress.

When the deployment process is finished, you will get the option to Go to resource.

Congrats! You have successfully created a new Computer Vision API.

Keys and Endpoint

To add the Computer Vision API to your client project, you need your Computer Vision subscription key and endpoint to get authorization. To find them, open the resource you’ve just created and go to the Keys and Endpoint tab. All you need to do is copy the Key 1 and Endpoint values.

And there you have it! In our next tutorial, we are going to see how to use the key and endpoint information to call the Cognitive Services API from a client application. I’ll guide you step-by-step to the process of creating a real-time object detection app that will draw rectangles around the detected objects.

Enjoy your cloud adventures!

Resources

• Microsoft Azure
• Azure Cognitive Services Documentation
• Computer Vision documentation
• Cognitive Services: See it in action