Use Azure Cognitive Services On-premise Containers Through VIDIZMO

Microsoft Azure is one of the leading cloud service providers, which can be seen from the fact that according to Business Insider, its annual run rate has now reached $18.9 billion.

The explosive growth has made Microsoft Azure one of the best cloud service providers out there. Among many services, one of the services offered by Azure is cognitive services of AI and Machine learning which can be connected through means of an API.

Azure cognitive services are also offered as Docker containers, to be used in any organization’s private on-premise data center. This is usually to meet compliance, security, data privacy and other requirements and needs that organizations present.

Several organizations do not want their data on the cloud and wish to stay away from the internet as much as possible for the needs specified earlier.

Hence, containerization of data is what comes in handy in situations like this, with billing being the only element that will require an internet connection.

This post will give you a brief on what are cognitive services and how you can use Azure cognitive services on-premise. Moreover, we will introduce VIDIZMO, a ready-made application that you can opt for if you need to use Azure cognitive services for videos on-premise.

What Are Azure Cognitive Services?

"AI within reach of developers"; this is what Azure Cognitive Services are. These services include a set of machine learning algorithms from which you can solve all sorts of problems through Artificial Intelligence.

It provides you with the following benefits and empowers developers around the globe to add AI capabilities to software applications.

• Azure Cognitive Services can be implemented by generally anyone, even those who have no AI, data science or machine learning expertise.

• Add AI capabilities to existing applications easily using REST APIs and client library SDKs. For deployment, APIs are available for Vision, Speech, Language, and Decision for implementation in your existing apps and new ones.

• Containerization allows you to have the choice of deploying in the cloud or on-premises data centers.

It offers the following services:

• Visual Text Recognition: OCR capabilities allow for text present in video frames to be indexed. This allows for text terms to act as searchable terms for the video.

• Closed Captioning: The audio present in the video is transcribed to a closed caption file that allows you to meet several accessibility and compliance requirements. The closed caption file, saved as a .VTT file, can be exported to .CSV, .PDF and .DOCX files.

  • Multilingual Detection: Prior to close captioning, the AI executes language detection algorithms. For an on-premises set up, containerization for each language present in the videos is necessary, i.e., setting up a language identification endpoint for each of these languages. VIDIZMO allows working with up to 4 languages out of a selection of 22, per video.

  • Audio Transcription: Audio input from a video can be transcribed easily with the languages being specified, by using speech-to-text conversion.

  • Keyword Extraction: To make a video more searchable, keywords are extracted from various elements. Semantic, logical analysis, and several other video processing techniques are used to extract these keywords.

Azure Cognitive Services Containers

According to Microsoft:

“Containerization is an approach to software distribution in which an application or service, including its dependencies & configuration, is packaged together as a container image.”

Azure Cognitive Service in containers lets you deploy and host services flexibly that come in docker containers. These containers will help you bring cognitive services closer to data compliance, security, and other operational reasons.

Running cognitive services in containers can be the solution to cater to your specific requirements or constraints in an on-premise data center. It is commonly used for connectivity and control over data.

An example where you can use a container is, for instance, if you have 1000’s of documents on-prem and you want to run OCR on those documents.

If you use the Computer Vision OCR endpoint in the cloud, you would require sending all the documents to the endpoint in Azure, while if you run in the container locally, you only require sending the billing information every 15 minutes to Azure.

But how would you implement Azure Cognitive Services containers?

Despite the detailed documentation provided by Microsoft, the configuration and implementation of Azure Cognitive Services containers is a tedious task. Select Project details, specify container and instance details, then under the tab of ‘Key and Endpoint,’ you must…….

WAIT! That is a lot of hassle! So many parameters and metrics to work with! The task can quickly become overwhelming.

How about a YouTube-like platform that provides on-premise Azure Cognitive Services without any trouble?

Complete Video Streaming Capabilities On-Premise Via Ready-Made Application

VIDIZMO is a Microsoft Gold Partner provider of a complete video streaming and management platform that provides deployment options for both on-premises and Azure cloud deployment.

The corporate YouTube-like platform is one that can be used for both streaming and management of videos across the enterprise. The platform VIDIZMO incorporates Azure Cognitive Services for its AI-based features.

The implementation and incorporation of Azure Cognitive Services for cloud deployment, and through containerization for on-premise deployment through VIDIZMO is not a difficult task. A few easy steps to configure Azure Cognitive Services is what it takes to get you started.

With Azure Cognitive Services incorporated, you can transcribe your videos, audio, and recordings into multiple languages, making it accessible for everyone. The transcripts are searchable, allowing users to jump to the relevant parts in a video.

Automation of tasks such as video redaction, translation, closed captioning, and more, is also possible with the integration of Azure Cognitive Services AI.

Furthermore, VIDIZMO, in-house streaming, lets you take advantage of your private WAN connection to private data centers, which means no internet is required.

You can securely host, retain and protect your videos by storing them on-premise behind your firewall, therefore, gaining complete control over your data.

LA County Uses VIDIZMO for On-Premise Video Streaming & Management with Their IT Team Maintaining Complete Control

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Not only that, VIDIZMO offers complete video content management capabilities such as video transcoding, restricted sharing, access controls, content segregation and retention.

Moreover, you can embed your videos and integrate VIDIZMO with different existing IT applications.