Azure Cognitive Services – Computer Vision
Azure Cognitive Services
Speech, language, vision, decision, and OpenAI services are the five most important types of Azure Cognitive Services. In the following section, we will take a deep look into each of these categories.
Speech
Speech services allow users to make applications that recognize speech. People who have dealt with Dragon NaturallySpeaking, Windows Speech Recognition, Braina, or Sonix can better appreciate the ease that comes with Azure speech recognition services. Also, Azure’s speech-to-text and text-to-speech services are more accurate and precise than similar services that don’t use AI. The following are the types of speech services provided by Azure:
- Speech-to-text: Real-time conversion of audio streams to text
- Text-to-speech: Helps turn text into computer-generated speech
- Speech translation: Enables speech translation in multiple languages in real time
- Voice assistants: Assist developers in creating conversational interfaces for applications
- Speaker recognition: Provides APIs for speaker recognition
- Intent recognition: Assists in the identification of speech, entities, and intent
Language
A language service can make an application literate enough to understand any language input into it. This really adds up to a better user experience as the system gets a lot better at understanding what has been requested of it in any possible language. Microsoft Azure has a lot of tools that can look at chunks of text and figure out what they mean. This lets it find and understand different languages.
The following are a few examples of how language services can be used:
- Language detection and sentiment analysis
- Entity recognition and key phrase extraction
- Language understanding and Q&A
- Process unstructured domain-specific text
- Converse with chatbot and devices
Vision
This service is an application that can look at any image or video and figure out what objects are in it, classify the objects in the image or video, do an analysis of the image, and read text from an OCR reader. This service records and changes information in any medium so that it can be used later when it is needed.
The following are the types of vision services provided by Azure:
- Computer Vision: It allows users to take advantage of cutting-edge image processing and retrieval algorithms. It can be used for things like recognizing text from an optical character reader, smart cropping, image analysis, and finding common objects.
- Face: You can use the Face service to detect, recognize, and analyze human faces in images. It is used in many scenarios such as identity verification, face blurring, finding similar faces, and identifying facial features.
- Custom Vision service: It provides capabilities to build image classifiers and custom object detection.
