Build Language-Enabled Apps and Services Using Azure Cognitive Services: Language APIs

OVERVIEW
I previously showcased the Vision APIs and Speech APIs and how you can give your apps mouth to talk, ears to hear, and eyes to see.
But what if you can give your apps intelligence to actually understand and act upon the intent behind a user’s input?
In this blogpost I will showcase Language APIs that give your apps intelligence to understand what your users actually want!
Language APIs Breakdown
Demo
Let’s try each one through the Azure portal.
If you find any of the following demos interesting just hover back to the breakdown section of the blog and click the corresponding links to try it for yourself!
Text Analytics
The Text Analytics API provides sentiment analysis, key phrase extraction, and entity recognition all at your fingertips, and as you can see in the demo below I used a positive sentence about visiting Egypt seeing the Pyramids and as you can see the results are very accurate!

QnA Maker
If you have FAQ in your app and you want it to be smart enough to understand new questions that maybe you have an answer for but under some other question, then QnA Maker is the way to go.
If you compare an existing question example and then use a paraphrased version of it, you will have similar results like the following demo.


Immersive Reader
The Immersive Reader API helps to read and comprehend text in real-time just like the one in Microsoft OneNote does.

Translator Text
The Translator Text API provides real-time text translation, just like Microsoft Translator does in the following example, detecting that the language of what I wrote is Arabic and translating that to English.

Language Understanding
LUIS enables to build natural language understanding solutions that understands the intent and relevant entities in a sentence and act upon them.
In the following demo I tried 2 different sentences with the same intent and entities, and the results matched!


Resources
It’s time to start integrating intelligence to your solutions, and you can get going using the available SDKs and examples that explains how to do so.
- Text Analytics Documentation
- QnA Maker Documentation
- Immersive Reader Documentation
- Immersive Reader SDK
- Translator Text Documentation
- Language Understanding (LUIS) Documentation
Summary
Language APIs are the backbone of any intelligent solution, because you can understand your user, there are no barriers!