This hands-on lab guides you through creating an Azure Search service that will be used to create an intelligent bot (that you will create in later labs) that returns images a user searches for. You could of course also use the Bing Web Search API, but that way you would only get results from publicly available websites. With Azure search, you can instead create a private search engine.
In this workshop, you will:
- Understand how to implement Azure Search features to provide a positive search experience inside applications
- Configure an Azure Search service to extend your data to enable full-text, language-aware search
This workshop is meant for an AI Developer on Azure. Since this is a short workshop, there are certain things you need before you arrive.
Also, you should have experience with the portal and be able to create resources (and spend money) on Azure. We will not be providing Azure passes for this workshop.
Note: This workshop was developed and tested on a Data Science Virtual Machine (DSVM) with Visual Studio Community Version 15.4.0
We're going to build an end-to-end scenario that allows you to pull in your own pictures, use Cognitive Services to find objects and people in the images, obtain a description and tags, and store all of that data into a NoSQL Store (CosmosDB). We'll use that NoSQL Store to populate an Azure Search index, and then build a Bot Framework bot using LUIS to allow easy, targeted querying.
Note: In this lab, we will only be creating the Azure Search service that you will use in a future lab to build a more intelligent bot.
In lab01.1-computer_vision, we built a simple C# application that allows you to ingest pictures from your local drive, then invoke the Computer Vision Cognitive Service to grab tags and a description for those images.
Once we had this data, we processed it and stored all the information needed in CosmosDB, our NoSQL PaaS offering.
Now that we have it in CosmosDB, we'll build an Azure Search Index on top of it (Azure Search is our PaaS offering for faceted, fault-tolerant search - think Elastic Search without the management overhead). We'll show you how to query your data, and then build a Bot Framework bot to query it. Finally, we'll extend this bot with LUIS to automatically derive intent from your queries and use those to direct your searches intelligently.
Note: In this lab, we will only be creating the Azure Search service that you will use in a future lab to build a more intelligent bot.
This lab was modified from this Cognitive Services Tutorial.
There are several directories in the resources folder:
- assets: This contains all of the images for the lab manual. You can ignore this folder.