A cognitive service is a piece of computing software that can consume a data type that we have defined previously and respond with a cognitive response.

A simple example of a cognitive service is image intelligence. This is the ability to upload an image to view its contents and label it. Almost all of us have experienced this feature using the camera app, where the camera software can detect faces and detect smiles on those faces. This is image intelligence.

Another type of intelligence is sentiment analysis. Given a few paragraphs of text, the cognitive service can detect the emotions in the text. A simple example could be a product Twitter account feeding all the tweets it's tagged in into a cognitive service to see the overall sentiment of people using the product.

Of late, video intelligence has become even more common. This is the ability to scan a video's contents and label it for rapid detection of content in various frames and scenes, and this is very helpful for navigating and indexing a long video.

Now that we understand what AI on the cloud is, let's look at why we need it.