APIs enable different software apps to communicate with each other. In fact, they consist of a set of rules and protocols. In short, they intermediate between the programmes. It allows access to a particular programme or service even though the developer is not aware of its internal workings. AI APIs are those which provide access to AI capabilities and functionalities.

The following are the AI APIs catering to different domains.

Computer Vision API

Here the vision APIs lead to comprehension of images and videos. There are facial recognitions, scene descriptions and object identification. The two such candidates are MS Azure Computer Vision API and Google Vision AI.

ML and Data Analytics APIs

Tools are provided by these APIs to train ML models. Predictive models are built by the developers. To illustrate, sci-kit-learn and TensorFlow.

Speech Recognition and Synthesis APIs

These convert spoken language into text and vice versa. We find them in voice assistants. They can be used in transcriptions. For instance, IBM Watson Speech-to-Text and Amazon Polly.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) APIs

Developers can analyze and manipulate language. The tasks they can execute are translation, summarization, and sentiment analysis. To exemplify, GPT API and Cloud Natural Language API (Google).

Working of APIs

APIs require a key or credentials provided by the service provider. There should be requesting for API services, say a text string as an input. AI APIs process the request — input data using their training and algorithms. Such work requires complex computation using GPU chips or TPU chips.

AI model ultimately infers patterns, extracts information and executes the intended task.

Response

The developer’s application gets back a response after AI processing. The response depends on what our prompts are.

Integration to Applications

The response given is integrated into the applications. This way users interact with the AI-assisted features seamlessly. This integration happens on internet or mobile apps, IoT devices, chatbots and so on.

Advantages of AI APIs

Developers have not to create models from scratch. Models which are pretrained are used to take benefit from APIs. These APIs are scalable. They are cost efficient, as businesses pay as per usage. They are accessible to broader audience. They are constantly updated.