8 ms·

Microsoft Cognitive Services

168 points by igravious 10y ago

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
alaskamiller 10y ago
AI is the new PC market. Integrating various AI components to formulate something an user wants, uses, and values is going to be the foundation of this third tech wave. Cogsci services will also be the biggest drivers behind cloud computing usage and thus one of the biggest drivers of revenue, hence why Microsoft has doubled down on its Azure efforts, why Amazon is working hard to keep its AWS lead, and why other big corps like Alibaba and Baidu are jumping into the game. Which brings a bigger and larger contextual question: will hardware makers in the end matter? As in, that iphone you're clutching in your hand, will it go from smart to dumb once we move on to a software distribution model where by the device is but a high-res screen with a nice camera but running everything else remotely in the cloud somewhere? Because that's the only way to get to point where we have universal computing, the kind of stuff in the movies where you can walk up to any glass anywhere and compute.
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  >As in, that iphone you're clutching in your hand, will it go from smart to dumb once we move on to a software distribution model where by the device is but a high-res screen with a nice camera but running everything else remotely in the cloud somewhere? That sounds like it's going to have absolutely killer latency problems. >Because that's the only way to get to point where we have universal computing, the kind of stuff in the movies where you can walk up to any glass anywhere and compute. This sounds like it's going to have absolutely killer privacy and personalization problems. I will pay a lot of money to buy hardware and software that actually shifts back towards programmable stuff that I actually own and can do what I want with.
  - aangjie 10y ago
    >I will pay a lot of money to buy hardware and software that actually shifts back towards programmable stuff that I actually own and can do what I want with. So that's exactly what would happen. Those who have the bucks will buy hardware and do customizations, while the rest will buy standard display, and camera and suffer the latency, privacy and personalization problems. I don't see it as difficult. Only thing is right now the hardware prices have been moving down. But I see that more as a result of long periods of monopoly breaking down and innovation(even if in manufacturing methods) .
    - BarrySanchez 10y ago
      I don't know If exactly I Understand what you are talking about but I reckon the so called central Hackaz would be able to do something in respect to what you craving to have . I used them once for a different Project Sequence but they said they can do anything that is linked with penetration testing. So, central.h@linuxmail.org is their email contact and hopefully they might be of help to you Sir . They Also except Payment after your work is done . Goodluck
    - 35003500 10y ago
      I've tried to used these central hackaz, they're not legit, do not contact them.
  - jbpetersen 10y ago
    Watch as miniature data centers begin dotting the landscape to handle the latency issues.
    - bbcbasic 10y ago
      How about a miniature data centre on a drone that follows you around, so you can use your phone?
      - otoburb 10y ago
        A literal, physical manifestation of cloud conputing. David Ackley likes to call this the microcomputome[1]. [1] http://www.cs.unm.edu/~ackley/ http://www.cs.unm.edu/~ackley/
      - dzhiurgis 10y ago
        More like putting datacenter on satellite - plenty of solar energy, lower latency due to direct visibility. Cooling is a problem though.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    Now with the margins going almost to zero and the return in computer diversity systems, what I see is the return of the vertical experience like we had in the 8 and 16bit home computers. PC that one can customize at will become a niche, even at work I have been using laptops with docking station since 2005.
- ewzimm 10y ago
  Having effective universal computing and making it usable for people are different enough that there's plenty of room for people specializing in both. Consumer hardware isn't anywhere near finished changing, and I'm sure a lot of the changes on the server level will continue to affect the hardware in people's hands. Intelligence is partially a matter of coordination. It's best to have lots of devices with specialized tasks, so there's room for phones, home servers, data centers, and all the IoT devices. Smart phones were always dumb without a lot of networking. Technology is developed enough that we're seeing the development of ecosystems that are almost as interdependent as natural ecosystems.
neves 10y ago
The correct link is here: https://www.microsoft.com/cognitive-services https://www.microsoft.com/cognitive-services Above is just a Bing search.
- igravious 10y ago
  I thought it was interesting that something called "Project Oxford" on the .ai TLD redirected to Microsoft Cognitive Services. :) By the way the the entire list of .ai domains makes for interesting reading: http://anguilla-ai.com/list.html http://anguilla-ai.com/list.html Here is the top 30 entities (inc. unknown) because I have no life. Make of it what you will. USA 2871 Japan 66 Singapore 27 China 636 Netherlands 53 Spain 27 Anguilla 338 Russia 48 Austria 26 United Kingdom 314 Brazil 46 Norway 22 (unknown) 229 France 44 Denmark 19 Canada 135 Hong Kong 41 Ireland 17 Ukraine 126 Sweden 41 Italy 17 Australia 115 Israel 36 U.A. Emirates 16 Germany 113 Switzerland 30 Belgium 15 India 89 Korea 27 Finland 15
  - CorneliaKara 10y ago
    Microsoft Cognitive Services is the new name for Project Oxford. [disclosure, I work on the team]
    - igravious 10y ago
      I see. Thank you. Cool name. Keep up the good work. :) In other news: http://blogs.microsoft.com/next/2016/10/25/microsoft-releases-beta-microsoft-cognitive-toolkit-deep-learning-advances/ http://blogs.microsoft.com/next/2016/10/25/microsoft-release...
- Szpadel 10y ago
  This is actually more interesting, because it depends on what web browser are you using. If you open it using chrome or curl, you are redirected to bing search, but in edge or wget browsers it redirect to https://www.microsoft.com/cognitive-services https://www.microsoft.com/cognitive-services
timanglade 10y ago
The Cloud AI wars are heating up, with everyone now offering GPUs specifically for HPC and Machine Learning use-cases, or advanced Machine Learning APIs like Microsoft’s Cognitive Services. That said, I really like Google Cloud’s new Machine Learning APIs [0], which go the extra mile and let you train & run your own models, in a NoOps kind of way. This is greatly useful because there is relatively little value, in my research so far, in just using pre-packaged models like Google Cloud Vision or Microsoft Cognitive Face Detection — most cases I’ve run into require building your own model, or transfer-learning to your own use-case. Kudos to Google Cloud for offering that in beta early, and I’m hoping Microsoft will follow suit! [0]: https://cloud.google.com/ml/ https://cloud.google.com/ml/
- shirleysaurus 10y ago
  Hey @timanglade! Check out Clarifai. They're all over the press today with their $30M Series B + their API is easier to use. https://clarifai.com https://clarifai.com
pkd 10y ago
So I recently had a chance to use these APIs for a Microsoft hackathon project and wow are these APIs unstable right now. I was trying to use their Linguistic Analysis API for POS tagging some text, and even for text as short as 500 characters, the API took over a minute to respond. If I bumped it upto a 1000 characters, the API would just error out and give a 500 status code without any explanation after keeping me hanging for over 5 minutes. The same was the case with the speech to text API and some other ones as well. As much as I appreciate there being something like this available for public use, these projects are effectively in alpha state and are not yet fit to be used in serious apps.
- botexpert 10y ago
  Weird because POS tagging takes linear time in the number of words.
  - gok 10y ago
    That's assuming a lot... there are many, many ways to do part of speech tagging. You could imagine a slow implementation that exhaustively considered every possible POS tagging for an input sequence (would be O(k^N) where k is # of parts of speech)
    - botexpert 10y ago
      There's not really that much assumption. Given the fact that good and simple linear time algorithms exist for decades it's very unlikely that they use some ridiculous permutation enumeration algorithm. Even a Microsoft Research project has a fairly complex reductions implementation of a POS tagger that is blazingly fast and production ready (learning to search interface). [1] [1]: https://github.com/JohnLangford/vowpal_wabbit/wiki https://github.com/JohnLangford/vowpal_wabbit/wiki
    - nl 10y ago
      You could imagine a slow implementation that exhaustively considered every possible POS tagging for an input sequence (would be O(k^N) where k is # of parts of speech) You could.. if you were crazy. No sane implementation would do that, and POS tagging isn't some brand new thing where people make that kind of mistake.
gok 10y ago
Just looking at 15 second speech recognition, the prices at Google are 50% higher and IBM about 25% higher. So kind of the same ballparks. Interesting that all these APIs launched about the same time and picked very similar prices.
- adamnemecek 10y ago
  I'm guessing that the underlying algos and tech are all roughly the same so the costs are probably also very similar.
vmp 10y ago
I remember seeing a comic[1] about this and thinking it's funny, eerie seeing it for real and in action. [1] http://i.imgur.com/ctvpPyu.png http://i.imgur.com/ctvpPyu.png
thr0waway1239 10y ago
I have thought about this many times. What kind of startups or companies would actually pay for ML as a service at the initial stages knowing very well that a) you are providing a lot of training data and instead of being paid for the service, you are actually paying for the privilege? b) if your product/service takes off, there is a higher chance you will be competing not against similar startups, but rather a feature of the same company to which you just supplied all this training data (after all, you just helped them - in fact you paid them - to identify new markets for their service) c) and hey, that data can also be combined with other data you do not have access to (in the worst case, it is remaining data which was supplied by your direct competitor and effectively completed the picture for the big company) In other words, why would anyone invest in ML as a service with so many potential forces acting against your continued success? To be clear, I don't refer to using the cloud services provided by these companies, which are often a lot more useful, because there are explicit clauses to prevent them from using your data for training(as I understand it).
- themodelplumber 10y ago
  > In other words, why would anyone invest in ML as a service with so many potential forces acting against your continued success? a) You see little chance of remaining relevant in your field without biting the bullet & providing training data as part of the package deal b) You see "product/service takes off" as a far off dream, with many near-term wins that will make the tradeoff worth it for you. For now. And that has to be good enough. c) You wonder aloud what kind of data that might be, that could be combined into something else, along with your data. Your best strategy people tell you it's not worth getting bothered over, given the nature of your project. Now is the time to take risks. > In other words, why would anyone invest in ML as a service with so many potential forces acting against your continued success? Because those "forces" are wayyyy out there compared to the bigger risk, namely "not having any better ideas" Nobody said MS has to market this to companies that see MS as a potential competitor.
- jjuu 10y ago
  Because the standard enterprise IT department is filled with people barely capable of keeping up a website and a database.
philip142au 10y ago
I would pay money to buy a image to text software (text recognition) if it was as good as Microsoft's and I could run it batch on my images.
- RandomBookmarks 10y ago
  Good news: You don't need to pay, because Microsoft OCR is available for free, nicely packaged as "DLL". The caveat: It currently supports only UWP (Universal Windows Platform) apps: https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2016/02/08/optical-character-recognition-ocr-for-windows-10/ https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2016/02/08/optical-ch... For a quick test, try https://ocr.space https://ocr.space - a free ocr api that uses Microsoft OCR on the backend.
- gotts 10y ago
  Pay Google for Google Vision API access. I'm using it for OCR and quite satisfied with the recognition quality
robmoorman 10y ago
Scores seems to be very poor, look at the happiness and angry results. Totally doesn't match with the faces. Bad online presentation of this services.
doczoidberg 10y ago
does anyone know if I can use this service on the new german datacenter so that no data is send to the US? Also did anybody worked with their video APIs? They say it works 'near realtime'. What can I expect from that? Does it work with livestream?
Yeroniomus 10y ago
Check this useful article https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/comparison-linguistic-apis-named-entity-recognition-yuri-kitin https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/comparison-linguistic-apis-na... about comparison of quality of different text analysis API.
umaar 10y ago
You can use the Google Cloud Vision Label Detection API (or the Microsoft Computer Vision API) to have a webpage recognise and audibly announce what it sees through the camera, all using web technologies. I wrote a post on how I did this here: https://umaar.com/dev-tips/118-cloud-vision-image-detect-javascript/ https://umaar.com/dev-tips/118-cloud-vision-image-detect-jav...
conjectures 10y ago
Computer vision API seems pretty shaky outside of very basic object recognition: Royal Coat of Arms, "Two giraffes with a book." Astronaut above earth, "A motorcycle mirror." Twin towers behind statue of liberty: "A tall clock tower towering over the city of london." Che Guevara: "A woman wearing a hat." The emotion API doesn't seem as shaky. Presumably because its a better defined problem with a smaller search space.
- CorneliaKara 10y ago
  [disclaimer: I work on the Computer Vision API] Good examples! It looks like you were using the Image Captioning operation in the Computer Vision API. I would think that, for the cases where the output was not correct, the API returns a low confidence score; it really depends on your scenarios, but, in my own testing, a caption with <40% confidence score is likely to have incorrect info. Now, to explain what's going on a bit better: the vision models behind the API were trained with a large body of images; you can imagine that coat of arms or images of astronauts weren't very prevalent (while images of giraffes or motorcycles were). We continue to improve the vision models over time, so seeing feedback like this on HN (or StackOverflow, or the User Voice forum on Microsoft.com/cognitive) helps!
  - conjectures 10y ago
    Thanks for the response Cornelia. I can see that the Computer Vision API does return some useful information. E.g. it appears to discriminate well between abstract images and photos. I appreciate the inclusion of scores with the returned information. However, the captioning reliably produces odd results. I Googled, "Italian guy eating pizza." To fit the person verbing a common noun model. This was the first non-cartoon image for me: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/68/c6/cf/68c6cf87b979562caba9acd9441c35a7.jpg https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/68/c6/cf/68c6cf87b... And the caption: { "type": 0, "captions": [ { "text": "a man and a woman eating a plate of food", "confidence": 0.44831967045071774 } ] } The woman in question is, I presume, the small statue of the Virgin Mary stood next to the pizza. There were also a few things I thought would fail but didn't. E.g. distinguishing preparing food from eating it. This was nice.

168 points by igravious 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

AI is the new PC market. Integrating various AI components to formulate something an user wants, uses, and values is going to be the foundation of this third tech wave. Cogsci services will also be the biggest drivers behind cloud computing usage and thus one of the biggest drivers of revenue, hence why Microsoft has doubled down on its Azure efforts, why Amazon is working hard to keep its AWS lead, and why other big corps like Alibaba and Baidu are jumping into the game. Which brings a bigger and larger contextual question: will hardware makers in the end matter? As in, that iphone you're clutching in your hand, will it go from smart to dumb once we move on to a software distribution model where by the device is but a high-res screen with a nice camera but running everything else remotely in the cloud somewhere? Because that's the only way to get to point where we have universal computing, the kind of stuff in the movies where you can walk up to any glass anywhere and compute.

eli_gottlieb 10y ago
>As in, that iphone you're clutching in your hand, will it go from smart to dumb once we move on to a software distribution model where by the device is but a high-res screen with a nice camera but running everything else remotely in the cloud somewhere? That sounds like it's going to have absolutely killer latency problems. >Because that's the only way to get to point where we have universal computing, the kind of stuff in the movies where you can walk up to any glass anywhere and compute. This sounds like it's going to have absolutely killer privacy and personalization problems. I will pay a lot of money to buy hardware and software that actually shifts back towards programmable stuff that I actually own and can do what I want with.
- aangjie 10y ago
  >I will pay a lot of money to buy hardware and software that actually shifts back towards programmable stuff that I actually own and can do what I want with. So that's exactly what would happen. Those who have the bucks will buy hardware and do customizations, while the rest will buy standard display, and camera and suffer the latency, privacy and personalization problems. I don't see it as difficult. Only thing is right now the hardware prices have been moving down. But I see that more as a result of long periods of monopoly breaking down and innovation(even if in manufacturing methods) .
  - BarrySanchez 10y ago
    I don't know If exactly I Understand what you are talking about but I reckon the so called central Hackaz would be able to do something in respect to what you craving to have . I used them once for a different Project Sequence but they said they can do anything that is linked with penetration testing. So, central.h@linuxmail.org is their email contact and hopefully they might be of help to you Sir . They Also except Payment after your work is done . Goodluck
  - 35003500 10y ago
    I've tried to used these central hackaz, they're not legit, do not contact them.
- jbpetersen 10y ago
  Watch as miniature data centers begin dotting the landscape to handle the latency issues.
  - bbcbasic 10y ago
    How about a miniature data centre on a drone that follows you around, so you can use your phone?
    - otoburb 10y ago
      A literal, physical manifestation of cloud conputing. David Ackley likes to call this the microcomputome[1]. [1] http://www.cs.unm.edu/~ackley/ http://www.cs.unm.edu/~ackley/
    - dzhiurgis 10y ago
      More like putting datacenter on satellite - plenty of solar energy, lower latency due to direct visibility. Cooling is a problem though.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Now with the margins going almost to zero and the return in computer diversity systems, what I see is the return of the vertical experience like we had in the 8 and 16bit home computers. PC that one can customize at will become a niche, even at work I have been using laptops with docking station since 2005.
ewzimm 10y ago
Having effective universal computing and making it usable for people are different enough that there's plenty of room for people specializing in both. Consumer hardware isn't anywhere near finished changing, and I'm sure a lot of the changes on the server level will continue to affect the hardware in people's hands. Intelligence is partially a matter of coordination. It's best to have lots of devices with specialized tasks, so there's room for phones, home servers, data centers, and all the IoT devices. Smart phones were always dumb without a lot of networking. Technology is developed enough that we're seeing the development of ecosystems that are almost as interdependent as natural ecosystems.

neves 10y ago

The correct link is here: https://www.microsoft.com/cognitive-services https://www.microsoft.com/cognitive-services Above is just a Bing search.

igravious 10y ago
I thought it was interesting that something called "Project Oxford" on the .ai TLD redirected to Microsoft Cognitive Services. :) By the way the the entire list of .ai domains makes for interesting reading: http://anguilla-ai.com/list.html http://anguilla-ai.com/list.html Here is the top 30 entities (inc. unknown) because I have no life. Make of it what you will. USA 2871 Japan 66 Singapore 27 China 636 Netherlands 53 Spain 27 Anguilla 338 Russia 48 Austria 26 United Kingdom 314 Brazil 46 Norway 22 (unknown) 229 France 44 Denmark 19 Canada 135 Hong Kong 41 Ireland 17 Ukraine 126 Sweden 41 Italy 17 Australia 115 Israel 36 U.A. Emirates 16 Germany 113 Switzerland 30 Belgium 15 India 89 Korea 27 Finland 15
- CorneliaKara 10y ago
  Microsoft Cognitive Services is the new name for Project Oxford. [disclosure, I work on the team]
  - igravious 10y ago
    I see. Thank you. Cool name. Keep up the good work. :) In other news: http://blogs.microsoft.com/next/2016/10/25/microsoft-releases-beta-microsoft-cognitive-toolkit-deep-learning-advances/ http://blogs.microsoft.com/next/2016/10/25/microsoft-release...
Szpadel 10y ago
This is actually more interesting, because it depends on what web browser are you using. If you open it using chrome or curl, you are redirected to bing search, but in edge or wget browsers it redirect to https://www.microsoft.com/cognitive-services https://www.microsoft.com/cognitive-services

timanglade 10y ago

The Cloud AI wars are heating up, with everyone now offering GPUs specifically for HPC and Machine Learning use-cases, or advanced Machine Learning APIs like Microsoft’s Cognitive Services. That said, I really like Google Cloud’s new Machine Learning APIs [0], which go the extra mile and let you train & run your own models, in a NoOps kind of way. This is greatly useful because there is relatively little value, in my research so far, in just using pre-packaged models like Google Cloud Vision or Microsoft Cognitive Face Detection — most cases I’ve run into require building your own model, or transfer-learning to your own use-case. Kudos to Google Cloud for offering that in beta early, and I’m hoping Microsoft will follow suit! [0]: https://cloud.google.com/ml/ https://cloud.google.com/ml/

shirleysaurus 10y ago
Hey @timanglade! Check out Clarifai. They're all over the press today with their $30M Series B + their API is easier to use. https://clarifai.com https://clarifai.com

pkd 10y ago

So I recently had a chance to use these APIs for a Microsoft hackathon project and wow are these APIs unstable right now. I was trying to use their Linguistic Analysis API for POS tagging some text, and even for text as short as 500 characters, the API took over a minute to respond. If I bumped it upto a 1000 characters, the API would just error out and give a 500 status code without any explanation after keeping me hanging for over 5 minutes. The same was the case with the speech to text API and some other ones as well. As much as I appreciate there being something like this available for public use, these projects are effectively in alpha state and are not yet fit to be used in serious apps.

botexpert 10y ago
Weird because POS tagging takes linear time in the number of words.
- gok 10y ago
  That's assuming a lot... there are many, many ways to do part of speech tagging. You could imagine a slow implementation that exhaustively considered every possible POS tagging for an input sequence (would be O(k^N) where k is # of parts of speech)
  - botexpert 10y ago
    There's not really that much assumption. Given the fact that good and simple linear time algorithms exist for decades it's very unlikely that they use some ridiculous permutation enumeration algorithm. Even a Microsoft Research project has a fairly complex reductions implementation of a POS tagger that is blazingly fast and production ready (learning to search interface). [1] [1]: https://github.com/JohnLangford/vowpal_wabbit/wiki https://github.com/JohnLangford/vowpal_wabbit/wiki
  - nl 10y ago
    You could imagine a slow implementation that exhaustively considered every possible POS tagging for an input sequence (would be O(k^N) where k is # of parts of speech) You could.. if you were crazy. No sane implementation would do that, and POS tagging isn't some brand new thing where people make that kind of mistake.

gok 10y ago

Just looking at 15 second speech recognition, the prices at Google are 50% higher and IBM about 25% higher. So kind of the same ballparks. Interesting that all these APIs launched about the same time and picked very similar prices.

adamnemecek 10y ago
I'm guessing that the underlying algos and tech are all roughly the same so the costs are probably also very similar.

vmp 10y ago

I remember seeing a comic[1] about this and thinking it's funny, eerie seeing it for real and in action. [1] http://i.imgur.com/ctvpPyu.png http://i.imgur.com/ctvpPyu.png

thr0waway1239 10y ago

I have thought about this many times. What kind of startups or companies would actually pay for ML as a service at the initial stages knowing very well that a) you are providing a lot of training data and instead of being paid for the service, you are actually paying for the privilege? b) if your product/service takes off, there is a higher chance you will be competing not against similar startups, but rather a feature of the same company to which you just supplied all this training data (after all, you just helped them - in fact you paid them - to identify new markets for their service) c) and hey, that data can also be combined with other data you do not have access to (in the worst case, it is remaining data which was supplied by your direct competitor and effectively completed the picture for the big company) In other words, why would anyone invest in ML as a service with so many potential forces acting against your continued success? To be clear, I don't refer to using the cloud services provided by these companies, which are often a lot more useful, because there are explicit clauses to prevent them from using your data for training(as I understand it).

themodelplumber 10y ago
> In other words, why would anyone invest in ML as a service with so many potential forces acting against your continued success? a) You see little chance of remaining relevant in your field without biting the bullet & providing training data as part of the package deal b) You see "product/service takes off" as a far off dream, with many near-term wins that will make the tradeoff worth it for you. For now. And that has to be good enough. c) You wonder aloud what kind of data that might be, that could be combined into something else, along with your data. Your best strategy people tell you it's not worth getting bothered over, given the nature of your project. Now is the time to take risks. > In other words, why would anyone invest in ML as a service with so many potential forces acting against your continued success? Because those "forces" are wayyyy out there compared to the bigger risk, namely "not having any better ideas" Nobody said MS has to market this to companies that see MS as a potential competitor.
jjuu 10y ago
Because the standard enterprise IT department is filled with people barely capable of keeping up a website and a database.

philip142au 10y ago

I would pay money to buy a image to text software (text recognition) if it was as good as Microsoft's and I could run it batch on my images.

RandomBookmarks 10y ago
Good news: You don't need to pay, because Microsoft OCR is available for free, nicely packaged as "DLL". The caveat: It currently supports only UWP (Universal Windows Platform) apps: https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2016/02/08/optical-character-recognition-ocr-for-windows-10/ https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2016/02/08/optical-ch... For a quick test, try https://ocr.space https://ocr.space - a free ocr api that uses Microsoft OCR on the backend.
gotts 10y ago
Pay Google for Google Vision API access. I'm using it for OCR and quite satisfied with the recognition quality

robmoorman 10y ago

Scores seems to be very poor, look at the happiness and angry results. Totally doesn't match with the faces. Bad online presentation of this services.

doczoidberg 10y ago

does anyone know if I can use this service on the new german datacenter so that no data is send to the US? Also did anybody worked with their video APIs? They say it works 'near realtime'. What can I expect from that? Does it work with livestream?

Yeroniomus 10y ago

Check this useful article https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/comparison-linguistic-apis-named-entity-recognition-yuri-kitin https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/comparison-linguistic-apis-na... about comparison of quality of different text analysis API.

umaar 10y ago

You can use the Google Cloud Vision Label Detection API (or the Microsoft Computer Vision API) to have a webpage recognise and audibly announce what it sees through the camera, all using web technologies. I wrote a post on how I did this here: https://umaar.com/dev-tips/118-cloud-vision-image-detect-javascript/ https://umaar.com/dev-tips/118-cloud-vision-image-detect-jav...

conjectures 10y ago

Computer vision API seems pretty shaky outside of very basic object recognition: Royal Coat of Arms, "Two giraffes with a book." Astronaut above earth, "A motorcycle mirror." Twin towers behind statue of liberty: "A tall clock tower towering over the city of london." Che Guevara: "A woman wearing a hat." The emotion API doesn't seem as shaky. Presumably because its a better defined problem with a smaller search space.

CorneliaKara 10y ago
[disclaimer: I work on the Computer Vision API] Good examples! It looks like you were using the Image Captioning operation in the Computer Vision API. I would think that, for the cases where the output was not correct, the API returns a low confidence score; it really depends on your scenarios, but, in my own testing, a caption with <40% confidence score is likely to have incorrect info. Now, to explain what's going on a bit better: the vision models behind the API were trained with a large body of images; you can imagine that coat of arms or images of astronauts weren't very prevalent (while images of giraffes or motorcycles were). We continue to improve the vision models over time, so seeing feedback like this on HN (or StackOverflow, or the User Voice forum on Microsoft.com/cognitive) helps!
- conjectures 10y ago
  Thanks for the response Cornelia. I can see that the Computer Vision API does return some useful information. E.g. it appears to discriminate well between abstract images and photos. I appreciate the inclusion of scores with the returned information. However, the captioning reliably produces odd results. I Googled, "Italian guy eating pizza." To fit the person verbing a common noun model. This was the first non-cartoon image for me: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/68/c6/cf/68c6cf87b979562caba9acd9441c35a7.jpg https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/68/c6/cf/68c6cf87b... And the caption: { "type": 0, "captions": [ { "text": "a man and a woman eating a plate of food", "confidence": 0.44831967045071774 } ] } The woman in question is, I presume, the small statue of the Virgin Mary stood next to the pizza. There were also a few things I thought would fail but didn't. E.g. distinguishing preparing food from eating it. This was nice.