Small businesses across the globe are adopting AI systems to streamline business and improve their revenue streams through Azure Cognitive Services.
Around 29% of small and medium businesses have already adopted AI and 82% of them claim that AI is helping them accelerate revenue growth. That said, it’s not easy for small businesses with limited resources to build AI products from scratch. While there are solutions that can help companies make their processes fast and efficient, it takes considerable talent and resources to launch AI products.
Azure Cognitive Services is one of the technologies that can help startups and companies launch AI solutions in a short time and with little resources.
Let’s explore what Azure Cognitive Services are and how they can help small businesses.
Azure Cognitive Services are a set of cloud computing services from Microsoft that helps developers bring AI or rather cognitive capabilities into their applications. Azure Cognitive Services help small businesses leverage the power of AI with all the benefits of cloud computing. Even without AI expertise or knowledge, businesses can create apps that utilize image recognition, speech recognition, and natural language processing capabilities.
While there are many other AI services, even from Azure, Cognitive Services are, well, largely about cognition. It’s about incorporating artificial intelligence solutions that can perceive, identify, and even understand the data from environmental sensors.
For example, if you want to analyze a piece of text or audio, you can call the APIs for the respective service and send your data to the cloud. It will send back audio transcriptions for the audio or make your app perform an action based on what the text said.
If the models from Azure are not enough for your specific use case, you can customize them according to your requirements on top of the solutions from Microsoft.
The services are compliant with CSA STAR, HIPAA BAA, and FedRAMP Moderate certifications. While services like image and facial recognition are language agnostic, Azure Cognitive Services have a detailed list of languages that speech-to-text, translations, and other services support.
Microsoft places a huge emphasis on the responsible use of AI with Cognitive Services from Azure. Throughout the linked documentation, you can notice Microsoft urging users to make use of them with regard to privacy and ethics. It also has built-in mechanisms to prevent misuse.
Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services are divided into five different areas. Let’s have a look at what they are and what you can do with them.
With Vision APIs in Azure Cognitive Services, Microsoft empowers developers to implement computer vision and facial recognition capabilities.
With its Computer Vision service, developers can extract text from printed or handwritten documents, objects and features from images, and even the presence of movement or people from video feeds. Developers can also develop and train image identifier models with custom labels.
Vision API also offers facial recognition services which developers can use for verifying identities or even building touchless access control.
As you can probably picture, the Speech APIs allow developers to add speech-to-text and text-to-speech functionality to their apps. They can use these services for captioning audio, identifying languages, analyzing sentiments from audio, and even creating voice assistants.
Developers can also add profanity filters within their applications and create more engaging conversations with their users using chatbots and Azure text-to-speech services.
With Azure’s Speech Studio, developers can even integrate speech services into their apps using a no-code approach. It also offers SDKs in multiple programming languages as well as a CLI for developers with different use cases.
With language APIs from Azure Cognitive Services, developers can extract entities, detect languages, sentiments, and opinions, and even extract health information from unstructured and structured data. It’s translation services help you translate texts and documents, and even lets you build custom industry or environment-specific translation models.
Microsoft also offers LUIS or Language Understanding service with which you can build conversational chatbots, commerce chatbots, and even control devices with voice commands all without any prior expertise in AI or ML.
These APIs are for building solutions that detect specific situations and create an event that other systems can recognize.
For instance, with its Anomaly Detection service, you can detect issues in your time series data. It works for both univariate anomaly detection which monitors just one variable and multivariate anomaly detection which can monitor up to 300 different variables to detect issues.
Decision APIs also have a Personalizer service with which you can train your application to take actions based on specific contexts.
Small businesses can use Azure Cognitive Services to build products and services with little expertise in AI or machine learning. Many Cognitive Services offer a no-code UI experience for businesses that want to leverage AI into their business processes.
Usually, incorporating a feature like an image or face recognition or creating an image recognition solution requires AI or machine learning experts to build their own models. They have to then train these models on accurate data and test and verify to make sure it’s working as required. As you can imagine, this takes considerable resources, time, and expertise.
With Cognitive Services from Azure, companies can reduce their time to market or build MVPs or prototypes with little resources. They can also add AI features to their existing solutions and workflows with the help of Azure Cognitive Services APIs.
Another benefit is that with Azure Cloud, businesses don’t have to worry about privacy or security concerns within their applications.
Azure Cognitive Services is a suite of AI and machine learning tools from Microsoft, enabling developers to integrate intelligent features into their apps with pre-built APIs for natural language processing, computer vision, speech recognition, and more.
If you or your company needs assistance in implementing this ground-breaking AI, reach out to our team of experienced professionals today.
