What are Cognitive Services?

With the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), one word seems to be appearing more than others and that's 'Cognitive'.  This blog will seek to explain what Cognitive means and give some more detail on the Cognitive Services which are available on the Microsoft Azure platform.

So what does Cognitive mean?  Cognitive comes from Cognition which is defined as "the act or process of knowing; perception".  In terms of technology this means that Cognitive Services are pieces of software which enable the computer to understand or process pieces of external information.  As an example, one which is in common use today is speech recognition.  An Amazon Alexa smart speaker or Siri on an iPhone both use Cognitive Speech Recognition to understand what the user is saying.

So Microsoft provides a range of services on their Azure public cloud platform.  These can be incredibly powerful for organisations as they provide enterprise ready AI capability without the investment which would be required to run them on-premise.  The diagram below shows the range of services which are currently publicly available.

Housing Associations can make use of these services in a number of ways.  The search services can help provide informative search results back to website users.  The speech recognition can listen to call centre calls and provide helpful suggestions to the staff member on how to resolve the resident's problem.  The language recognition can be used to provide better feedback to frequently asked questions.

If you'd like to explore the use of any of these items then Ceox can help.  Get in contact if you'd like to know more.