How to call Cognitive Services APIs with R

Microsoft Cognitive Services is a set of cloud-based machine-intelligence APIs that you can use to extract structured data from complex sources (unstructured text, images, video and audio), and add "AI" type features to applications. A good example is the "Seeing AI" glasses in the video below: the image descriptions, emotion inference, and text recognition are all driven by Cognitive Services APIs. You can call these APIs from any application, including R. But since every Cognitive Service API is just a standard REST API, we can use the httr package to call the API. Input and output is standard JSON, which we can create and extract using the jsonlite package. And there are already Python SDKs for many of the services, including the Face API.) Shohbit has also published a step-by-step guide to calling Cognitive Services APIs from R, with several examples of using the Text Analytics API.