Azure Fundamentals · Lesson

Azure Cognitive Services Overview

Survey the Azure AI Services portfolio — Vision, Language, Speech, and Decision — and provision a multi-service resource to call multiple APIs with one key.

What Are Azure AI Services?

Azure AI Services (formerly Azure Cognitive Services) is a family of pre-built AI APIs that let developers add intelligent features to applications without training machine learning models from scratch. The portfolio covers four domains: Vision (analyse images and video), Language (understand and generate text), Speech (convert between audio and text), and Decision (personalise content and detect anomalies). All are accessible via REST APIs, SDKs, or the Azure portal.

Multi-Service vs Single-Service Resources

You can provision AI Services in two ways. A multi-service resource (called Azure AI Services in the portal) provides access to most APIs through a single endpoint and API key — convenient for development and experimentation. A single-service resource (e.g. Computer Vision or Text Analytics) gives access to only one API with dedicated billing and quota limits per service. For production, single-service resources are often preferred to control spend and apply service-specific security policies.

# Create a multi-service Azure AI Services resource
az cognitiveservices account create \
  --name myAIServices \
  --resource-group myRG \
  --kind CognitiveServices \
  --sku S0 \
  --location eastus

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