Building AI applications is hard work, but cloud vendors are making it easy by exposing simple-to-call, pay-as-you-use APIs. This Forrester’s article lists 5 categories of AI APIs available today:

• Vision: making applications see – convert speech to text and text to speech, identify the speaker, and analyze speech for insights
• Speech: making applications listen and speak
• Language: making applications understand – recognize entities, extract intent, topics, and sentiment, translate text
• Conversation: making applications interact – determine intent, follow up with questions, and then take appropriate actions
• Knowledge: making applications encyclopedic – find relevant information either through greater search functions, by accessing enhanced data, or by returning decisions based on submitted and/or external data