what are the relationships between cognitive services, machine learning and Azure OpenAI

Question

I am new to the whole machine learning and generative AI development and struggling to understand where to do work in the Azure environment.

So when do you use Machine Learning versus Azure OpenAI?

Where does the Azure Cognitive Services fit in?

Thanks in advance to whomever can clear the fog for me

Answer 1

Cognitive Services, Azure Machine Learning (AML), and Azure Cognitive Search are all AI services available on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.

Cognitive Services is a set of pre-built APIs, SDKs, and services that allow developers to easily add intelligent features such as emotion and video detection, facial, speech, and vision recognition, and speech and language understanding to their applications. It can be used by developers without machine learning experience.

AML, on the other hand, is a cloud-based platform for building, training, and deploying machine learning models. It is tailored for data scientists. The process of creating custom models in AML involves preparing data, creating a model, training and validating the model, deploying it, and then monitoring and maintaining it.

Azure OpenAI, on the other hand, is a partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI to enable innovation in artificial intelligence (AI) while ensuring that the benefits of AI are broadly and evenly distributed around the world. So, Azure OpenAI is not a separate service like Cognitive Services or AML, but a collaboration between Microsoft and OpenAI to advance the field of AI.

Regarding when to use Machine Learning versus Azure OpenAI, it depends on your specific use case and the problem you are trying to solve. Machine Learning is a technique used to train models to find patterns in data and make predictions or decisions based on that data. Azure OpenAI provides access to large scale AI models that you can use for your specific use cases such as natural language processing and vision services.

Overall, if you need a custom model to be trained specifically on your own data, then AML is the service to use. If you need access to pre-trained models in areas such as natural language processing and vision services, then Azure OpenAI can help. If you want to add intelligent features such as emotion and video detection, facial, speech, and vision recognition, and speech and language understanding to your application without having to train your custom model, then you can use Cognitive Services.

I hope this clears the fog for you! Let me know if there is anything else I can help you with.

References:

• Understanding Azure AI Services by Ashish Sahu | July 2019 [https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2019/july/azure-ml-understanding-azure-ai-services]
• Cognitive Services and machine learning [https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/cognitive-services-and-machine-learning#how-are-cognitive-services-and-azure-machine-learning-aml-similar]
• Azure Cognitive Search documentation [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search/search-what-is-azure-search]