Cognitive Services Pricing—Computer Vision API

Computer Vision API

• What are the different operations that you can accomplish with Computer Vision API?

  Please refer to the documentation for more detailed descriptions of these operations.

  • Tag—Computer Vision API returns tags based on more than 2,000 recognizable objects, living beings, scenery, and actions. In cases where tags may be ambiguous or not common knowledge, the API response provides “hints” to clarify the meaning of the tag.
  • Face—Detects human faces within a picture
  • GetThumbnail—After an image is uploaded, GetThumbnail generates a high-quality thumbnail. The Computer Vision API algorithm analyzes the objects within the image, then crops the image to fit the requirements of the region of interest (ROI).
  • Color—The Computer Vision algorithm extracts colors from an image. The colors are analyzed in three different contexts: foreground, background, and whole. The colors are grouped into 12 dominant accent colors.
  • Image Type—Computer Vision API can set a Boolean flag to indicate whether an image is black and white or color, as well as use the same method to indicate whether an image is a line drawing or not. Image Type also indicates whether an image is clipart or not, and the quality.
  • OCR—Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology detects text content in an image. The identified text is extracted into a machine-readable character stream for search and numerous other purposes, ranging from medical records to security and banking. It automatically detects the language. OCR saves time and provides convenience for users by allowing them to simply take photos of text instead of transcribing it. Please refer to Documentation for supported languages.
  • Adult—Apply the adult/racy settings to enable automated restriction of adult content in images.
  • Celebrity—Azure’s celebrity recognition model recognizes 200,000 celebrities from business, politics, sports, and entertainment around the world.
  • Analyze—Call multiple operations at once. Specify which functions you want to run and the API will run all of these together. Each operation included in “Analyze” will be counted as a separate transaction.
• What will my bill look like?

  Each operation that you call (either individually or through “Analyze”) will be counted as a transaction. The total bill will be based on the number of transactions for each type of operation within a monthly billing period.

  As a specific example, let’s say you make the following calls in a certain monthly billing period:

  • 1,500,000 Analyze operations, each calling both Tag and Describe operations
  • 500,000 OCR (printed) operations
  • 4,000,000 OCR (handwriting) operations

  Your total bill will be constructed as follows:

  Operations	Calculations
  1,500,000 Tag operations:	First 1,000,000 transactions: $-/1000 * 1,000,000 = $- Remaining 500,000 transactions: $-/1000 * 500,000 = $-
  500,000 OCR (printed) operations:	$-/1000 * 500,000 = $-
  5,500,000 Describe and OCR (handwriting) operations:	$-/1000 * 5,500,000 = $-

General

• How does billing for Cognitive Services APIs work?

  The Emotion API, Face API, Language Understanding Intelligent Service API, Bing Speech-to-Text API, and Bing Text-to-Speech API are billed per 1,000 API transaction calls when a production API call is being actively executed. Billing is prorated for production API transaction call quantities.

  The Bing Long Form Speech API service is billed per hour of speech that is analyzed. The billing is prorated on a per-minute basis.

  The Recommendations API and Text Analytics API can be purchased in units of the standard tiers at a fixed price. Each unit of a tier comes with included quantities of API transactions. If the user exceeds the included quantities, overages are charged at the rate specified in the pricing table above. These overages are prorated, and the service is billed on a monthly basis. The included quantities in a tier are reset each month.

• What happens if I exceed the transaction limit on my free tier for Text Analytics?

  Usage is throttled if the transaction limit is reached on the free tier. Customers can't accrue overages on the free tier.

• What constitutes a transaction in the Text Analytics API?

  Any annotation to a document counts as a transaction. Batch scoring calls will also take into consideration the number of documents that need to be scored in that transaction. So for instance, if 1,000 documents are sent for sentiment analysis in a single API call, that will count for 1,000 transactions. If an API supports more than one annotation operation, that will also be considered. Let’s say an API call performs both sentiment analysis and key-phrase extraction on 1,000 documents, that will count for 2,000 transactions (2 annotations × 1,000 documents).

• What happens if I exceed the transaction limit on a standard tier?

  If the usage on a standard tier is exceeded, the account starts to accrue overages. These overages are billed on a monthly basis, and are calculated at the rate specified for each tier.

• What constitutes a transaction in the Recommendations API?

  Any API call (with the exception of batch scoring calls) counts as a transaction. Batch scoring calls will count based on the number of items that need to be scored in that transaction.

• What happens if I exceed the transaction limit on my free tier for Recommendations API?

  Usage is throttled if the transaction limit is reached on the free tier. Customers cannot accrue overages on the free tier. Batch scoring is not supported on the free tier.

• How does billing for Recommendations API work?

  The Recommendations API can be purchased in units of the standard tiers at a fixed price. Each unit of a tier comes with included quantities of API transactions. If the user exceeds the included quantities, overages are charged at the rate specified in the pricing table above. These overages are prorated, and the service is billed on a monthly basis. The included quantities in a tier are reset each month.

• Can I change the tier of service I subscribed to?

  You may upgrade to a higher tier at any time. The billing rate and included quantities corresponding to the higher tier will begin immediately.