The easiest way to describe Azure Cognitive Services is that it is machine learning as a service. With just a simple API call, we can use machine learning in our applications, without which we have to use complex data science techniques. When we use APIs, we are making predictions against the models that Microsoft has trained for us.
The services in Azure Cognitive Services have been organized into five categories, detailed as follows:
- Vision: The vision services are about image processing. These include APIs for face recognition, detection of adult content, image classification, and Optical Character Recognition (OCR).
- Knowledge: An example of a knowledge service is the Question and Answer (QnA) makers that allow us to train a model with a knowledge base. When we have trained the model, we can use it for getting answers when we are asking questions.
- Language: The language services are about understanding text, examples being text analytics, language...
