Setting up Azure Cognitive Services!

I’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.

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

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)…

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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. 🙂