You have just started on the road to learning about Microsoft Cognitive Services. This chapter will serve as a gentle introduction to the services that it offers. The end goal is to understand a bit more about what these Cognitive Services APIs can do for you. By the end of this chapter, we will have created an easy-to-use project template. You will have learned how to detect faces in images and have the number of faces spoken back to you.
Throughout this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
- Applications that already use Microsoft Cognitive Services
- Creating a template project
- Detecting faces in images using a Face API
- Discovering what Microsoft Cognitive Services can offer
- Doing text-to-speech conversion using the Bing Speech API
The best way to introduce Microsoft Cognitive Services is to see how it can be used in action. Microsoft (as well as other companies) has created a lot of example applications to show off its capabilities. Several may be seen as silly, such as the How-Old.net (http://how-old.net/) image analysis and the what if I were that person application. These applications have generated quite some buzz, and they show off some of the APIs in a good way.
The one demonstration that is truly inspiring, though, is the one featuring a visually impaired person. Talking computers inspired him to create an application to allow blind and visually impaired people to understand what is going on around them. The application has been built upon Microsoft Cognitive Services. It gives us a good idea of how these APIs can be used to change the world, for the better. Before moving on, head over to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2mC-NUAmMk and take a peek into the world of Microsoft Cognitive Services.