Premade AI in the Cloud with Python
Create a simple bot with vision, hearing, and speech using Azure and Colab Notebooks
There is a fleet of clouds with their own minds floating over the internet trying to take control of the winds. They’ve been pushing very aggressively all kinds of services into the world and absorbed data from every possible source. Among this big bubble of services, an increasing number of companies and applications are relying on pre-made AI resources to extract insights, predict outcomes and gain value out of unexplored information. If you are wondering how to try them out, I’d like to give you an informal overview of what you can expect from sending different types of data to these services. In short, we’ll be sending images, text and audio files high into the clouds and explore what we get back.
While this way of using AI doesn’t give you direct, full control over what’s happening (as you would using machine learning frameworks) its a quick way for you to play around with several kinds of models and use them in your applications. It’s also a nice way to get to know what’s already out there.
In general, before we can use any kind of cloud service, we must first:
- Create a subscription with a particular cloud provider.
- Create a resource: to register the particular service we’ll be using and
- Retrieve credentials: to authorize our applications to access the service.
And while there are many cloud providers likely able to suit your needs, we’ll be looking at Microsoft’s Azure Cloud. There is a ton of options and tutorials that will likely confuse you if you don’t know where to start, so for the first part of this post we will walk through from scratch and get to know what we need to make use of the following services:
All resources from the Cognitive Services platform of Azure, a nice collection of…
