Playing with cognitive services

If you know what your users do or talk about you will likely have advantages over your competitors, or if you have support desk, you want to dispatch the ticket to the correct department as quickly as possible. To gain some insights you can use different AI/Machine learning tools to help you and ‘automatically’ perform actions.

Microsoft cognitive services is a set of APIs which let you do things like text analytics. I have played around a bit and found that I could pretty easy do a sentiment test (how ‘happy’ is the author) and a key phrase analysis (what is the text about). To do an analysis I needed to send the text in English. By living in Norway I am fortunate i many ways, but one of them is that Norwegian translate very good programmatically in to English

Since Microsoft (or Google and AWS) let’s us translate text through their translation API, you can in theory run text analysis on any language. I played around a bit and i managed to send some text through translation and in the end output a sentiment analysis and the key phrases. I set up the script in Azure Functions as well and it works pretty good.
To use it you will have to sign up for two Cognitive Services accounts in Azure, One for the Text Analytics API and one for the Translator API. In your Azure function you will have to set up the two API keys as variables.

The script is available on Github and it is totally a proof of concept without any error handling other than the APIs itself. Feel free to contribute to the code. Version when writing 0.5b

Here is an example on a text i found on a French news site.

Donald Trump a réaffirmé, lundi, ses positions critiques vis-à-vis de l’Otan, de l’UE, et de la politique d’accueil des migrants lors d’entretiens accordés à des médias européens. Une vision toujours proche de celle de Vladimir Poutine.

Une erreur catastrophique de Merkel sur l’accueil des migrants, l’Otan obsolète, le succès du Brexit qui marque le début de la fin de l’Union européenne. Si le fond ressemble à du Vladimir Poutine, la forme, elle, est clairement signée Donald Trump.

Lundi 16 janvier, à cinq jours de son investiture, le magnat de l’immobilier n’a pas mâché ses mots pour exposer ses vues sur les sujets d’actualité les plus brûlants sur le Vieux Continent, auprès des journaux britannique Times et allemand Bild.

Translated in to English

Donald Trump has r affirm, Monday, his criticism-screws – live NATO, the EU, and the migrant policy in interviews granted to European media. A vision still close to that of Vladimir Poutine.

A catastrophic error of Merkel on the reception of migrants, NATO MP4 you, the success of the Brexit brand the d to the end of the European Union. If the background looks like from Vladimir P
utin, the form, she is clearly sign e Donald Trump.

Monday, January 16, five days of his inauguration, the real estate mogul has no m ch her words to present its views on the topics of news the most br callers on the old Continent, aupr s of B
ritish newspapers Times and German Bild.

Not the best translation, but the analisys is quite OK

Sentiment Score : 87.73 %

Key phrases : Monday, Vladimir Putin, NATO MP4, Vladimir Poutine, criticism-screws - live NATO, aupr s of British newspapers Times, real estate mogul, end, European media, reception of migrants, m ch, old 
Continent, success, e Donald Trump, European Union, br callers, migrant policy, form, interviews, days, Brexit brand, inauguration, words, catastrophic error of Merkel, topics of news, German
Bild, background, January, vision

The tests done in Norwegian is pretty much spot on, and English analysis is just as you would expect.