The Role of Cognitive Services in Modern Web Applications

Cognitive services are of great use in modern web applications. Take a look at their characteristics, benefits and challenges.

- Phani Kiran

Some of the common traits of modern web applications are high scalability, high availability and great user experience. These applications need to be accessed from anywhere in the world with low latency and should be highly secured. They also should be rendered on multiple device types and provide an omni-channel experience. And the story doesn’t end there. They can be made more ‘engaging’ by leveraging cognitive (artificial intelligence/ machine learning) services. The goal is that an application needs to understand the user just like a human being and provide great overall user experience. With cognitive services, the application can see, hear, speak, understand, interpret and decide!

Characteristics of cognitive systems

Cognitive systems use data from different systems, understand context and try to provide the best possible response. They use machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques to achieve this.

They iterate over a rich wealth of knowledge to provide the best possible answer. They also need ‘meaningful’ interactions with the user as the responses depend on the relative dimension of understandability of user context by the cognitive service.