Cognitive Services APIs: Speech Speech recognition is in many ways at the heart of Artificial Intelligence. The 18th Century essayist Samuel Johnson captured this beautifully when he wrote, “Language is the dress of thought.” If the ultimate goal of AI research is a machine that thinks like a human, a reasonable starting point would be to create a machine that understands how humans think. To understand how humans think, in turn, requires an understanding of what humans say. In the previous post in this series, you learned about the Cognitive Services Vision APIs. In this post, we’re going to complement that with an overview of the Speech APIs. The Cognitive Services Speech APIs are grouped into three categories: Bing Speech—convert spoken audio to text and, conversely, text to speech. Speaker Recognition—identify speakers and use speech recognition for authentication. Custom Speech [ more… ]