Applications can be made faster, better, and literally smarter.
But you’ll be surprised to discover how much smarter they can be!
After discussing approaches to app development like the microservice
architecture and the CQRS pattern, we are moving on to a special topic:
adding artificial intelligence to apps with the help of cognitive services.
We’ll tell you what cognitive services do, introduce a collection of them,
and also deliver some hot news about their increased availability.
Who could previously imagine an application that was able to tell the speaker’s intentions or emotions from their voice alone? Or an app capable of describing images with sentences, letting the visually impaired people “see” the world? What about identifying people by face or voice for safety and convenience? Let your imagination go, without limits — it’s time to remember your favourite science fiction movies, because the future has come, and you can now implement all these, and many more “magic” features, in your application. It is possible with the help of cognitive services.
Cognitive technologies have rushed into the IT world to change it forever. Cognitive-enabled apps are able to perceive large amounts of data from various sources, analyze its meaning, and make well-informed predictions and decisions. They can see, hear, and understand things like humans can, but are tireless, efficient, dispassionate and unbiased like machines are. What a great combination!
Leave your competitors in… the present!
Having a cognitive application will let you be many steps ahead of your competitors. You will be in the future, while they are left in the present. No time machine, just the magic of cognitive services! Apps with artificial intellect can streamline many processes, save plenty of time and money, and, of course, make your interaction with your customers much more profound, personal, and engaging. In addition, you can offer them something truly unique and useful.
Hot news about more cognitive service availability
One of the cognitive computing giants, Microsoft, has recently made a very nice announcement that makes cognitive services more available and lucrative than ever.
At the Microsoft Data Amp in late April 2017, they announced some of the APIs in their Cognitive Service collection coming into general availability. They are: Face API, Computer Vision API and Content Moderator API.
Face API
Using Face API, it was previously possible to recognize people’s faces, detect their age, gender, and face features. Now it can also simultaneously tell a person’s emotions from the picture.
Computer Vision API
In addition to using Computer Vision API’s superpowers to identify the content of images and describe them with understandable sentences, it now also recognizes 9,000 landmarks across the globe. It can also transform handwriting into digital text.
Content Moderator API
The third participant of this lucky trio is the Content Moderator API, which provides the full cycle of content moderation with machine support.
What else do we have in this kit? A glimpse at Microsoft Cognitive Services
Totally, Microsoft’s collection of cognitive services now contains 25 APIs, which are worth a little overview. They are grouped into five functional categories:
The Vision category is all about being able to understand the content in images and videos. It includes the Computer Vision, Emotion, Face, Video, and Content Moderators APIs.
The Speech category is meant for understanding and synthesizing spoken words and recognizing the speakers. It comes equipped with the Custom Speech, Speaker Recognition, and Bing Speech APIs.
The Language category is able to understand the intent of the text, process the text and recognize what the users want. Its secrets lie in the following APIs: Bing Spell Check, Language Understanding, Linguistic Analysis, Text Analytics, Web Language Model, and Translator Text & Speech.
The Knowledge category deals with adding concepts to the text, connecting to some greater concepts, and doing something with these concepts. It has Academic Knowledge, Entity Linking, QnA Maker, Language Exploration, and Recommendations APIs on its cognitive “team.”
The Search category aims at accessing tons of webpages, images and videos with the power of Bing. Its APIs are Bing Auto Suggest, Bing Image Search, Bing News Search, Bing Video Search, and Bing Web Search.
What about some examples?
Examples speak louder than a thousand words, so get acquainted with real apps based on cognitive services.
Do you remember how we asked you in the beginning of this article to let your imagination go without limits? We hope that this overview will inspire you with some great ideas concerning your future cognitive-enabled application! We are always ready to help you with them and add our imagination to yours. Our experienced team of developers will create an intelligent application for you with the help of cognitive services. Welcome to the future!