Today, we’re in the midst of the biggest machine empowerment in the history of human kind. The current time may be remembered in history for the birth of the intelligent machine age.
We’re seeing more and more intelligent systems. Major technology corporations have already started building and introducing intelligent machines, intelligent systems, and intelligent apps. Your smart phone isn’t smart anymore. Now, it is an intelligent machine, loaded with intelligent apps, that manages your life, including health, scheduling, reminders, chores, shopping, social, and recommendations.

“Artificial intelligence is the technology of 2017”

This year, major technology conferences including Microsoft Build, SAP Sapphire, Google IO, Apple WWDC, Facebook F8, all had one thing in common: Artificial Intelligence.

Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Mark Zuckerberg, and Tim Cook have announced year 2017 a year of AI and machine learning. Clearly, in 2017, AI is the “big thing” of today.
Machine learning is a branch of artificial intelligence that gives machines the ability to learn and make decisions by using patterns and algorithms. Machine learning is being used everywhere. Websites such as Facebook and LinkedIn use machine learning to recommend posts and friends to you. Amazon uses machine learning to recommend products and personalize your shopping experience.
Smartphones are using machine learning to organize your photos and map recommendations. Email clients use machine learning to recognize spam and filter emails.

“Machine learning is a part of our daily lives.”

Today, the study of the human brain and human behavior seems to be the center of focus for most innovation companies.
Cognitive computing is a discipline of computer science that involves working with the human brain and building platforms for human interaction with computers, using machine learning.
Cognitive services include platforms and APIs to build intelligent, machine learning-based applications to interact with humans and focus on vision, speech, language, and knowledge.
In this article, I share my thoughts about some of the top cognitive services APIs for developers to build intelligent apps.

#4. Apple CoreML

Do you ever wonder how your iPhone or other smart devices knows about your target destination, detecting faces of your friends in images, or suggest words when you text? Let’s call it the magic of machine learning. All smart devices have some kind of machine learning processing behind the scenes.
Image source: Apple
Apple’s CoreML is a native layer built into Apple’s iOS 11 operating system to take advantage of low level technologies like Metal and Accelerate and takes advantage of the CPU and GPU to provide maximum performance and efficiency.
Image source: Apple
CoreML provides APIs for vision, natural language processing, and GameplayKit.
Learn more about Apple CoreML here.

#3. Amazon AI

Amazon AI services is a cloud-based API that provides developers the ability to build intelligent applications with speech, natural language, and image processing functionality.
Image source: Amazon
Amazon AI consists of three services – Lex, Polly, and Rekognition.
Image source: Amazon
Learn more about Amazon AI here.

#2. Google Cloud Platform

Google’s cognitive services APIs are a part of Google’s cloud machine learning platform. It provides a powerful API for developers in the following areas.
Image source: Google
Google cloud provides APIs for computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing, and translation.
Learn more about Google machine learning here.

#1. Microsoft Cognitive Services

Microsoft Cognitive Services is the most comprehensive and advanced cloud based API to build intelligent applications. Microsoft Cognitive Services is a set of 29 different APIs that provides functionality to implement computer vision, speech recognition and translation, natural language processing, knowledge and recommendation, and intelligent search.
Microsoft Congnitive Services

Vision API

Vision API is a set that includes Computer Vision, Emotion, Video Indexer, Face, Video, Content Moderator, and Custom Vision Service.

Speech API

Speech API provides services of speech recognition and speech translation. It includes Speaker Recognition, Translator Speech, Custom Speech Service, and Bing Speech APIs.

Language API

Language API provides functionality to implement natural language processing. Language API set includes LUIS, Bing Spell Check, Web Language Model, Text Analytics, Translator Text, and Linguistic Analysis.

Knowledge API

Search API

Bing API provides functionality to build smarter and more engaging apps and websites using Bing search engine. The Bing APIs include Autosuggest, Video Search, Image Search, Web Search, News Search, and Custom Search.
Learn more about Microsoft Cognitive Services here.

Summary

In this article, I shared a list of available cognitive services APIs for developers. Apple, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are clearly leading the way. Microsoft Cognitive Services is clearly is the most comprehensive, advanced, and intelligent service among them all.
Get started with Microsoft Cognitive Services here >