Showing posts with label APIs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label APIs. Show all posts

Sunday, 3 July 2016

Microsoft Cognitive Services - powerful algorithms to build custom apps with just a few lines of code

Microsoft Cognitive Services is a collection of the following APIs:
  1. Academic Knowledge API  helps to interpret user queries for academic intent and retrieve rich information from the Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG). The MAG knowledge base is a web-scale heterogeneous entity graph comprised of entities that model scholarly activities: field of study, author, institution, paper, venue, and event. The MAG data is mined from the Bing web index as well as an in-house knowledge base from Bing.
  2. Bing Autosuggest API lets partners send a partial search query to Bing and get back a list of suggested queries that other users have searched on 
  3. Bing Image Search API provides a similar (but not exact) experience to Bing.com/Images 
  4. Bing News Search API provides a similar (but not exact) experience to Bing.com/News 
  5. Bing Speech API is a cloud-based API that provides advanced algorithms to process spoken language. With this API, developers can add speech driven actions to their applications including real-time interaction with the user. This REST API offers industry-leading speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and language understanding capabilities delivered through the cloud. Microsoft has used Bing Speech API for Windows applications like Cortana and Skype Translator as well as Android applications like Bing Torque for Android Wear and Android Phone.
  6. Bing Spell Check API which performs contextual spell checking for any text and provides inline suggestions for misspelled words. Current spell-checkers rely on verifying spelling and grammar against dictionary-based rule sets which get updated and expanded periodically. In contrast, the Bing team has developed a web-based spell-checker that leverages machine learning and statistical machine translation to dynamically train a constantly-evolving and highly-contextual algorithm to provide spell checking on-demand for almost any word or phrase that exists on the web.
  7. Bing Video Search API provides a similar (but not exact) experience to Bing.com/Videos 
  8. Bing Web Search API provides a similar (but not exact) experience to Bing.com/Search 
  9. Microsoft Computer Vision API is a cloud-based API that provides developers with access to advanced algorithms for processing images and returning information. By uploading an image or specifying an image URL, Microsoft Computer Vision algorithms can analyze visual content in different ways based on inputs and user choices. Computer Vision API offers image “tagging” based on more than 2000 recognizable objects, living beings and actions. In cases where tags may be ambiguous or not common knowledge, the API response provides “hints” to clarify the meaning of the tag in context of a known setting. 
  10. Microsoft Emotion API allows you to build more personalized apps with Microsoft’s cloud-based emotion recognition algorithm. The Emotion API takes an image as an input, and returns the confidence across a set of emotions for each face in the image, as well as bounding box for the face, from the Face API. The emotions detected are happiness, sadness, surprise, anger, fear, contempt, disgust or neutral. 
  11. Microsoft Entity Linking Intelligence Service is a web service created to help developers with tasks relating to entity linking.Sometimes in different contexts, a word might be used as a named entity, a verb, or other word form within a given sentence. For example, in the case where “times” is a named entity, it still may refer to two separately distinguishable entities, such as “The New York Times” or “Times Square”. Given a specific paragraph within a document, the Entity Linking Intelligence Service will recognize and identify each separate entity based on its context. 
  12. Microsoft Face API is a cloud-based API that provides the most advanced algorithms for face detection and recognition. The Face API provides high precision face location detection that can detect up to 64 human faces in an image. Face detection can be done by uploading an entire JPEG file or by specifying a URL of an existing JPEG image on the web.
  13. Microsoft Knowledge Exploration Service (KES) offers a fast and effective way to add interactive search and refinement to applications. With KES, you can build a compressed index from structured data, author a grammar that interprets natural language queries, and provide interactive query formulation with auto-completion suggestions.
  14. Linguistic Analysis APIs provide access to natural langauge processing (NLP) tools that identify the structure of text. The current release provides three types of analysis: Sentence separation and tokenization, Part-of-speech tagging, Constituency parsing
  15. Language Understanding Intelligent Services (LUIS) is designed to enable you to quickly deploy an HTTP endpoint that will take the sentences you send it and interpret them in terms of the intention they convey and the key entities that are present. One of the key problems in human-computer interactions is the ability of the computer to understand what a person wants, and to find the pieces of information that are relevant to their intent. Once your application is deployed and traffic starts to flow into the system, LUIS uses active learning to improve itself.
  16. The Recommendations API built with Microsoft Azure Machine Learning helps your customer discover items in your catalog. Customer activity in your digital store is used to recommend items and to improve conversion in your digital store. The recommendation engine may be trained by uploading data about past customer activity or by collecting data directly from your digital store. When the customer returns to your store you will be able to feature recommended items from your catalog that may increase your conversion rate.
  17. Microsoft Speaker Recognition APIs are cloud-based APIs that provide the most advanced algorithms for speaker verification and speaker identification.
  18. Text Analytics API is a suite of text analytics services built with Azure Machine Learning currently offering APIs for sentiment analysis, key phrase extraction and topic detection for English text, as well as language detection for 120 languages
  19. Microsoft Video API is a cloud-based API that provides advanced algorithms for tracking faces, detecting motion, stabilizing and creating thumbnails from video.
  20. Microsoft Web Language Model API (WebLM) is a REST-based cloud service providing state-of-the-art tools for natural language processing. Using this API, your application can leverage the power of big data through language models trained on web-scale corpora collected by Bing in the EN-US market. 
The following Bing APIs are generally available: Bing Autosuggest API, Bing Spell Check API, Bing Search APIs. These Bing APIs are available as standalone services, and general availability pricing went into effect on July 1, 2016.

    Wednesday, 8 June 2016

    HOW TO use Bing Search v5 API with JavaScript

    Taking off from the single basic JavaScript sample on the newly minted version 5 of Bing Search API, I put together a couple of samples of my own. You'll have to sign-up for a free key from Microsoft Cognitive Services to replace in the code samples to try them & also experiment with all the other APIs that are available



    Bing Search API gets not just web search results but also image, news, & videos results for a given query and allows up to 1,000 free transactions per month across all Bing Search APIs

    Google Custom Search API has a few additional steps & provides 100 search queries per day for free

    This comparison of version 2 and 5 highlights the improvements -
    Category Featurev2v5
    Web SearchREST API xx
    Related searchesxx
    Ranked Answers
    (image, video, news, math, time)
    x
    Deep links (for first web page result)x
    Adult intent signalx
    Image SearchREST API xx
    Enhanced filters: image size, license, stylex
    Visually similar images and productsx
    Merchant and recipe sources
    (for product and food images)
    x
    Trending imagesx
    Entity recognition (for people)x
    Computer-generated captionsx
    Video SearchREST API xx
    Video previews (motion thumbnails)x
    Enhanced video metadata
    (creator, resolution, view count)
    x
    Free / Paid video filterx
    Trending videosx
    News searchREST API xx
    News articles by category or marketxx
    Trending news (general or by category)x
    Enhanced article metadata, including featured entities
    Spell CheckREST API x
    Autosuggest REST APIx
    GeneralLocation and market awarenessxx
    Spelling suggestions xx
    Safe searchxx
    Related searchesxx
    Continuous relevance improvementsx
    Ongoing support and feature improvementsx

    Related: Google vs. Microsoft Bing Search APIs: A Detailed Comparison

    Saturday, 31 October 2015

    This Week I Learned - Week #134

    This Week I Learned -

    You can use Windows Server 2012 Standard for the SQL server nodes-unlike in previous Windows releases, you can enable the failover cluster feature in the Standard edition of Windows Server 2012 as well as Windows Server 2012 Datacenter. SQL Server 2012 does require the Enterprise edition of SQL Server 2012 to use the AlwaysOn feature

    SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups are supported between Microsoft Azure Regions

    * There is a web application with code on Github that can detect a user's location and find the latency of various Azure data centers with respect to the user. For Amazon Web Services timings, there is CloudPing.info

    * The whitepaper "On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services" [PDF] by James Hamilton summarizes the best practices accumulated over many years in scaling some of the largest services at MSN and Windows Live

    * The game The Walking Dead: No Man’s Land which currently occupies #1 spot (over 1,000,000 downloads and 31M minutes played on opening weekend alone) on Apple’s Top Free App chart uses Azure DocumentDB. The Next Games development team selected Azure DocumentDB, the fully managed NoSQL JSON database as they needed to ingest massive volumes of game profile and state metadata while serving low latency queries (under 10 ms)

    * Microsoft also launched Cloud Accelerator Program in India along with its partners to help businesses create cloud adoption blueprints to identify applications which can move to the cloud.

    * SQL AlwaysOn is the technology of choice for disaster recovery of a SQL Server. Azure Site Recovery now provides native support for SQL AlwaysOn.

    * Pat Meenan has tirelessly been maintaining the WebPageTest tool for nearly 10 years. Web performance guru Steve Souders, is responsible for many key WebPageTest features including the filmstrip. This tool now has a book on it - Using WebPageTest

    Wayback Machine API can retrieve Wayback Snapshots at a certain time. If the timestamp parameter not specified, the most recently available capture in Wayback is returned.  It may be possible to recover an entire website from the Wayback Machine

    * A growing number of institutions are allowing their photo archives via Flickr & its API

    Only 1% of medical articles on Wikipedia have passed review, yet it is widely accessed, with 5 billion page views per year.

    Staycation is a fancy term for spending your time-off at home.  In the days of cheap air travel and a booming economy this never would have been considered.  Some people have spent their lives in one area and want to get away and explore new places.  But we are a country on the move.  According the U.S. Census Bureau, about 1 in 6 Americans move each year and the average American moves 11.7 times in their life.

    * "moot" formerly and more acceptably meant "open for discussion, debatable". It is now more commonly used to mean "irrelevant to discussion or debate". "awful" was originally used as a term to mean full of awe, even better than awesome but it now means something exceptionally bad. Auto-antonyms are words which in and of themselves have two or more generally accepted meanings in the English language that directly or generally contradict each other. Such words are also known as antagonyms, contronyms, and words having self-contradictions. Many such contra-definitions arise from slang usage. Others develop as a result of their frequent use in sarcasm.

    * 43 Mutual Fund houses in India manage over Rs 13 trillion worth of assets

    The Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation that administers the city is divided into 150 wards and 18 circles. These 18 circles are clubbed into 5 zones very appropriately named North, South, Central, East and West Zones. The Secunderabad Cantonment Board (SCB) takes care of most of the defense lands and the residential colonies in Secunderabad. It is divided into seven wards. Osmania University is independently handled by the administration of the college. Hyderabad Urban Agglomeration (HUA) is spread over four parliamentary constituencies – Hyderabad, Secunderabad, Malkajgiri and Chevella. In terms of the state assembly constituencies, the HUA is spread over 26 of them across three districts. - Hyderabad Urban Lab

    Routemaster Hyderabad is a website for crowdsourcing bus routes information in Hyderabad and for generating bus routes

    Cyberabad Police provides Crime Maps and Accident maps by police station and nature of offence

    Group A employees form less than 5 per cent of the total Indian Central government workforce; Group C and D are about 90 per cent.