Setting up Azure Cognitive Services!

imageI’m excited to start sharing a lot of research I’ve been doing for my upcoming Hololens development talks…

“Augmented Eyes = Azure Cognitive Services + Hololens”

Where to get started?

Note – everything I’m using including Azure and the Cognitive Services is free, no cost – so don’t hesitate to follow along and get everything setup!  My hope is that you’ll do some really cool stuff and “share-it-back” to our community. 🙂

1) If you don’t have one – you can sign up for a Free Microsoft Azure Account.

2) Once you have that, login to your Azure Portal.

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3) Click on “New” > “Intelligence + Analytics” > “Cognitive Services APIs (preview)

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4) You’ll get the “Create” tab – where the first field to fill out is the “Account name” with the hint of “Enter the name of your API account” – it wasn’t immediately initially clear what they were looking for here, but turns out this is just the name that will appear in your Azure services describing this – so let’s go with “CogFaceApi” (or whatever you want)…

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5) Choose “Face API (preview)”

Note – we’re going to setup “Face API (preview)”, “Emotion API (preview)” and “Computer Vision API (preview)” – it’s the same steps, so we’ll go through the first one together – then just go back through when you’re done with the first one and setup each in turn.

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6) Choose “F0” under the “Pricing tier” – this is the free version.

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7) For “Resource group” – make something up again – I’ll be using “CogServices” for all the Cognitive Services.

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8) Check the “agree to the terms” checkbox, check the “Pin to dashboard” checkbox, click “Continue” and you should see your service created!  W00t!

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9) Follow these same steps for both the “Emotion API (preview)” and the “Computer Vision API (preview)

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10) Let’s take a brief moment to talk about the pricing models…

For testing most everything – 30,000 calls per month should be more than sufficient.

Bu when we sell apps that have these services embedded, especially fixed cost apps – we need to be cognoscente of our monthly costs less we end up paying more than we make. 

Would recommend we look further into subscription or fixed-use applications if these services are going to be used.

Here is the specific Pricing for all Cognitive Services.

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11) Last thing that we’ll need for all of our applications moving forward is the API keys, click on the “pinned” service, for example “CogFaceApi” > click on “Key” and those two keys are the ones we will use in our applications to call these services. 

Note the links above – those let us re-generate these keys should we use them – in say – code examples or blogs. 🙂

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LanceMVPThis is just the beginning – go and explore the Cognitive Services!

Stay tuned…

//Lance Larsen

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