Using Azure Cognitive Services Language Text Translation with PowerShell

28th of August, 2018 / / No Comments

Introduction

Over the last few months whilst developing my Voice Assistant for Microsoft Identity Manager I’ve been leveraging a number of the Azure Cognitive Services. Each one has its own nuance as they all appear to be in differing iterations of maturity. My first hurdle when looking to leverage one, is the examples provided. Often the samples are in languages I’m not fluent in and pretty much always there is no examples of using PowerShell and the awesome Invoke-RestMethod call to interact with them.… [Keep reading] “Using Azure Cognitive Services Language Text Translation with PowerShell”

Bots: An Understanding of Time

9th of July, 2018 / / No Comments

Some modern applications must understand time, because the messages they receive contain time sensitive information. Consider a modern Service Desk solution, that may have to retrieve tickets based on a date range (the span between dates) or a duration of time.
In this blog post, I’ll explain how bots can interpret date ranges and durations, so they can respond to natural language queries provided by users, either via keyboard or microphone.
First, let’s consider  the building blocks of a bot, as depicted in the following view:

The client runs an application that sends messages to a messaging endpoint in the cloud.… [Keep reading] “Bots: An Understanding of Time”

Using your Voice to Search Microsoft Identity Manager – Part 1

25th of June, 2018 / / No Comments

Introduction

Yes, you’ve read the title correctly. Speaking to Microsoft Identity Manager. The concept behind this was born off the back of some other work I was doing with Microsoft Cognitive Services. I figured it shouldn’t be that difficult if I just break down the concept into individual elements of functionality and put together a proof of concept to validate the idea. That’s what I did and this is the first post of the solution as an overview.… [Keep reading] “Using your Voice to Search Microsoft Identity Manager – Part 1”

Utilising Azure Speech to Text Cognitive Services with PowerShell

8th of June, 2018 / / No Comments

Introduction

Yesterday I posted about using Azure Cognitive Services to convert text to speech. I also eluded that I’ve been leveraging Cognitive Services to do the conversion from Speech to Text. I detail that in this post.
Just as with the Text to Speech we will need an API key to use Cognitive Services. You can get one from Azure Cognitive Services here.

Source Audio File

I created an audio file in Audacity  for testing purposes.… [Keep reading] “Utilising Azure Speech to Text Cognitive Services with PowerShell”

Performing OCR with Azure Cognitive Services and HTML5 Media Capture API

30th of March, 2017 / / No Comments

There are a few ways to access camera on mobile devices during application development. In our previous post, we used the getUserMedia API for camera access. Unfortunately, as of this writing, not all browsers support this API, so we should provide a fallback approach. On the other hand, HTML5 Media Capture API is backed by almost of all modern browsers, which we can utilise with ease. In this post, we’re going to use Vue.js, TypeScript and ASP.NET… [Keep reading] “Performing OCR with Azure Cognitive Services and HTML5 Media Capture API”