As government agencies try to adopt AI to accelerate their digital transformation, there is a need for services that enable faster application of AI to common scenarios, without requiring any machine learning expertise. Most any application can be made more "intelligent". The opportunity is to determine where the greatest impact. Agency websites and applications can be easily modernized in order to create more inclusive, accessible and intelligent services for citizens.
Applied AI Services, built on top of Azure Cognitive Services with additional task-specific AI models and business logic to solve common problems organizations encounter, such as translation of documents and websites. Without having AI expertise, development teams can build AI solutions that meet these needs faster through the integration of multiple languages into applications websites, tools, or any solution requiring multi-language support.
Risks
Azure Cognitive Services provides information and guidelines on how to responsibly use artificial intelligence in applications. Below are the links to articles that provide this guidance for the different services within the Cognitive Services suite. Overview of Responsible use of AI - Azure Cognitive Services | Microsoft Docs
Rationale
Azure Cognitive Services are cloud-based artificial intelligence (AI) services that help you build cognitive intelligence into your application. Machine translation has been used as a first pass by several of our language service provider (LSP) partners, prior to using human translation and can improve productivity by up to 50 percent. It will create more accessible and inclusive Digital Services, and improve citizen engagement, and overall citizen service.
As-Is
The usage of this application is to communicate with non-English speaking users. Today, if a non-English speaking immigrant needs to communicate with an agency, a request is made to secure a time on the translator telephone line. There are high costs associated with each translator telephone call
Business Process Model
Text translation is a cloud-based REST API feature of the Translator service that uses neural machine translation technology to enable quick and accurate source-to-target text translation in real time across all supported languages.
To get started, you'll need an active Azure subscription. If you don't have an Azure subscription, you can create one for free. Once you have your Azure subscription, create a Translator resource in the Azure portal.
After your resource deploys, select Go to resource and retrieve your key and endpoint.
You need the key and endpoint from the resource to connect your application to the Translator service. You'll paste your key and endpoint into the code later in the quickstart. You can find these values on the Azure portal Keys and Endpoint page:
Use the free pricing tier (F0) to try the service and upgrade later to a paid tier for production