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Artificial intelligence is growing in importance, and many devices and applications
already use sophisticated algorithms to improve people’s lives and business tasks.
As developers, getting familiar with artificial intelligence is extremely important so
we can start thinking about the next generation of applications and about our customers’
needs. Among others, Microsoft Cognitive Services offer a wide range of sophisticated
algorithms that can be consumed through the standard REST approach. Therefore, they
can be used to develop intelligent cross-platform and cross-device apps, such as mobile
apps and web applications in any programming language and on any development
platform. Specifically, this book covers the Computer Vision API, a service capable of
understanding and interpreting the content of any images, providing a natural language
description that can even be sent to other Microsoft services, such as the Speech API
or the Translation API to make your app speak about the analysis result in a different
language. The Computer Vision service can also analyze images for optical character
recognition to detect print and handwritten words and sentences, and it includes
domain-specific models that help you identify important people or landmarks in a
picture and that in the future could be extended according to your needs.
The Computer Vision API, as well as other Microsoft Cognitive Services, relies on
the REST standard and returns JSON data. This means these powerful services can be
consumed by any application, on any platform, and with any programming languages
and frameworks supporting REST and JSON. |
