{"id":6903,"date":"2017-01-27T12:00:19","date_gmt":"2017-01-27T12:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/?p=6903"},"modified":"2017-01-27T00:01:43","modified_gmt":"2017-01-27T00:01:43","slug":"playing-around-azure-cognitive-services","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2017\/01\/playing-around-azure-cognitive-services.htm","title":{"rendered":"Playing around with Azure Cognitive Services"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been spending quite a bit of time recently getting more familiar with some of the advanced workloads in Microsoft Azure. After all, infrastructure as a service is commodity,\u00a0so I’m looking at services that can be used to drive real value for my customers (more on that in another post…).<\/p>\n

Yesterday, was our team meeting – with all but one of the risual Architects getting together, including some coaching from Microsoft around data and intelligence services. I was particularly taken with some of the demonstrations of Cognitive Services, so I set about getting some sample code to work for me…<\/p>\n

Building the Intelligent Kiosk sample application<\/h3>\n

First up, I needed to install Visual Studio 2015 (Community Edition is fine) – it took a while, and needed admin credentials (so a visit to our support team) but eventually it installed on my PC.<\/p>\n

Then, I downloaded the sample code for the “Intelligent Kiosk” from Github<\/a>.\u00a0F5 to build the solution told me that:<\/p>\n

A project with an Output Type of Class Library cannot be started directly.<\/em><\/p>\n

In order to debug this project, add an executable project to this solution which references the library project. Set the executable project as the startup project.<\/em><\/p>\n

The\u00a0Intelligent Kiosk sample code is a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app, so I ignored that message, continued with the build, and tracked down the resulting IntelligentKioskSample.exe file. Trying to run that told me:<\/p>\n

This application can only run in the context of an app container.<\/em><\/p>\n

And StackOverflow told me that I need to sideload the app onto my PC<\/a>,\u00a0by creating a package to use locally<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Installing the Intelligent Kiosk sample application<\/h3>\n

The application package comes with a\u00a0PowerShell script to install it (Add-AppDevPackage.ps1), but I found I needed to follow these steps:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Enable developer mode in Windows 10 Settings<\/li>\n
  2. Restart the PC<\/li>\n
  3. Open a PowerShell session as an Administrator and run:<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Show-WindowsDeveloperLicenseRegistration<\/code><\/p>\n

    Get-WindowsDeveloperLicense<\/code><\/p>\n

    Set-ExecutionPolicy unrestricted<\/code><\/p>\n

    .\\Add-AppDevPackage.ps1<\/code><\/p>\n

    Now the app is ready and available via the Start Menu…<\/p>\n

    Running the Intelligent Kiosk sample application<\/h3>\n
      \n
    1. Get some API keys (for free) from the Microsoft Cognitive Services site<\/a>.<\/li>\n
    2. Run the Intelligent Kiosk app.<\/li>\n
    3. Go to settings and paste in your API keys.<\/li>\n
    4. Have some fun with the demos!<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
      \"Demos
      Intelligent Kiosk Demos<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
      \"Azure
      Emotion detection (web image)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
      \"Azure
      Emotion detection (live image)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
      \"Azure
      Face Detection<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
      \"Azure
      Detect age and gender, recommend a product!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

      Further Reading<\/h3>\n