Chapter 10. Connecting the Pieces

The previous chapter focused on the last API umbrella, covering Bing Search APIs. Throughout this chapter, we will connect the pieces. Our Smart-House application can currently utilize several APIs, but mostly individually. We will see how to connect LUIS, image analysis, Bing News Search, and Bing Speech APIs together. We will also look at the next steps that you can take after completing this book.

Completing this chapter will take us through the following topics:

• Making an application smarter, by connecting several APIs

• Real-life applications utilizing Microsoft Cognitive Services

• Next steps

Connecting the pieces

Until now, we have seen all the different APIs, mostly as individual APIs. The whole idea behind the Smart-House application is to utilize several APIs at the same time.

Throughout this chapter, we will add a new intent in LUIS. This intent is for getting the latest news, optionally for different topics.

Further on, we want to actually search for news, using Bing News API. We will do so by allowing the end user to speak a command, converting spoken audio to text, with the Bing Speech API.

When we have some news articles, we want to get the headline, publishing date, and description. In case there is a corresponding image to the article, we want to get a description of the image. We will do this by adding the Computer Vision API.

With all the news article information in place, we want to get that read back to us. We will do this by converting text to spoken audio.

Creating an intent

Let us start by adding our new intent. Head over to https://www.luis.ai, and log on with the...

Real-life applications using Microsoft Cognitive Services

There are some examples of applications that currently utilize Microsoft Cognitive Services. We will look at some of them here.

Uber

Most of you have probably already heard of Uber. For those that have not, here is a short summary:

Uber is an app that was created to match drivers with people looking for rides. People can open the app, and request a ride. Drivers (registered Uber drivers, that is) located nearby can then pick up the person requesting a ride. After a ride, the driver is payed through the app.

To ensure a more secure experience, a photo of the driver is sent to the passenger. This way, passengers can be safe that the driver is who they say they are. This may cause problems, as drivers may not always look like their photo. They may have grown a beard, or shaved off a beard, or similar changes may have occurred.

To account for this, Uber decided to add a new feature. Each driver needs to sign in when they are using the app...

Where to go from here

By now you should know the basics of Microsoft Cognitive Services, enough to get started with building your own applications.

A natural way forward is to play around with the different APIs. The APIs are continuously improved and worked upon. It is worth going through the API documentation, to keep up with changes and to learn more. In addition, Microsoft keeps adding new APIs to the services. Through the writing process of this book, I have seen three new APIs added. Those might be interesting to look into.

Another possibility is to build upon the Smart-House application that we have started on. We have put down some ground work, but there are still a lot of opportunities. Perhaps you can work on improving what we have already got. Maybe you see some opportunities to mix in other APIs, which we have covered.

Reading through this book might have given you some ideas of your own. A great way forward would be to implement them.

Like we have seen, there are many possible areas...

Summary

Through this chapter, we have completed our journey. We created a new intent for news retrieval. We learnt how to deal with an action, triggered from this intent. Based on voice commands, we managed to fetch the latest news, for one topic, and have the Smart-House application read it back to us. Next, we went on to see what kind of real-life applications are utilizing Microsoft Cognitive Services today. Finally, we concluded this chapter by looking at some natural next steps that you can take after completing this book.