Comparing Cognitive Services and Applied AI Services

• Cognitive Services and Applied AI Services offer prebuilt AI capabilities that help speed application development, compared to building capabilities manually.
• Most services in Applied AI Services are built on top of Cognitive Services components, allowing developers to switch between and combine the services.
• The offerings are priced, accessed, and deployed separately to help customers pay for only the services they need.
• Most offerings also leverage other Azure components like storage that carry additional cost and configuration requirements.

Azure Cognitive Services and Azure Applied AI Services are collections of prebuilt and trained components that can be used to create applications that solve artificial intelligence (AI)-related tasks, such as adding facial recognition to a security application, providing language translation to online FAQs, or including chat bots in a customer service Web site. While use of these services could speed application development and reduce upfront development costs, some require additional configuration or training before deployment, and the more preconfigured services may have limited options compared to custom-developed solutions.