Choosing the Right Machine Learning Service in Azure (Part 2 of 4)

By Ashwin Venugopal -

 



To read part 1, please click here
To read part 3, please click here
To read part 4, please click here





Azure Cognitive Services

Azure Cognitive Services are the most popular choice as they are easy to use and can be integrated with a single REST API call from within any programming language by adding ML capabilities to the existing applications. Some of the popular cognitive services are:
  1. Vision: Computer Vision and Face API
  2. Language: Text analytics and translator service
  3. Speech: Text analytics, speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and speech translation
  4. Decision: Anomaly detection and content moderation

Most of the Cognitive Services APIs work similarly- Firstly, you have to deploy a specific cognitive service or a Cognitive Services multi-service account in Azure, and after that, you can easily retrieve the API endpoint and access key from the service as well as call the Cognitive Service API with your data and API key. This process will enrich an existing application with API capabilities.

Custom Cognitive Services

As Cognitive Services can only allow you to use the functionalities offered by the API, without any room for customize the labels or tags in the image classification API. However, there are some Custom Cognitive Services that can allow you to do just that, some of them are:
  1. Vision: Azure Custom Vision 
  2. Language: Language Understanding and QnA Maker
  3. Speech: Custom speech-to-text
  4. Speech: Custom text-to-speech
  5. Speech: Speaker recognition
  6. Decision: Azure Personalizer

Each of the above services offers an interface to train or customize a built-in ML model with your own domain-specific training data. For example- Azure Personalizer allows you to optimize an online recommendation engine through reinforcement learning, whereas, the Azure Custom Vision service allows you to fine-tune a pre-trained ML model on your own training data which is also called transfer learning.

Azure Applied AI Services

The Applied AI Services are also a pre-trained customizable AI services loosely grouped under a common name to build specialized services. They are all the services developed by Microsoft on top of Cognitive Services due to strong demand from large enterprise customers for these exact services, however, they don't fit neatly into categories. Some of these services are:
  1. Conversations: Azure Bot Service
  2. Documents: Azure Form Recognizer
  3. Search: Azure Cognitive Search
  4. Monitoring: Azure Metrics Advisor
  5. Videos: Azure Video Analyzer
  6. Accessibility: Azure Immersive Reader

However, if you want to fully customize the algorithms, error metrics, and models, then, you have to implement the model and ML pipeline on your own.








To read part 1, please click here
To read part 3, please click here
To read part 4, please click here
























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