Exploring Artificial Intelligence (AI) Services from Cloud Vendors

Currently the market is buzzing with talk of artificial intelligence (AI) and/or machine learning (ML) along with the power of the cloud and edge computing. Talking to various people across different industries there’s genuine excitement about the change that is about to take place. However, what businesses struggle with is how to take the leap and get started. Most organisations, whilst they may have been capturing and managing data for quite some time, don’t have luxury of having a data scientist on staff. Luckily there are a range of services provided by different cloud providers that are in effect commoditizing artificial intelligence.

In a previous post I covered working with Microsoft’s custom vision service to do number plate recognition, which is one out of many services offered by Microsoft under the banner of their cognitive services. In fact, the custom vision service is one out of a number of vision related services:

– Computer Vision

– Video Indexer

– Custom Vision

– Face

– Content Moderator

But Microsoft isn’t alone in provision vision and image services. Google have a set of AI services, which include:

Cloud Vision API

Cloud Video Intelligence

And of course AWS have similar services, such as their Amazon Rekognition service.

Each of these services have their strengths and weaknesses but the question really starts with the problem that needs to be solved. Does it make sense for a business to investigate these services? Are there opportunities to make use of these services?

Leave a comment