Introduction to cognitive services and artificial intelligence

The functionalities discussed in this chapter all deal with AI and machine learning (ML). Before we turn to the individual providers and their functionality, we will first classify the topic in general and consider what benefits AI can bring to everyday life and in the business context.

In general, it can be said that AI can help to recognize structures in text, image, or sound information so that they become machine-readable. Cognitive services hereby refer to a set of cloud-based application programming interfaces (APIs) and tools provided by Microsoft, IBM, Google, and other vendors that enable developers and creators to add advanced AI capabilities to their applications without needing to have deep expertise in ML or data science. The actions offered in PAD by the different vendors provide more or less the same functionalities, shown in the following diagram. Only the naming of the services is slightly different...