Vonage is a communication platform as a service (CPaaS) provider for consumers and businesses that makes it possible for customers to connect and communicate on any device through cloud-hosted voice, video, chat and short message service (SMS).
Want to integrate your business phone system or contact center with your CRM?
1.
2.
3. The Complete Guide to APIs and How
They are Disrupting Technology
Introduction: What is an API and What Types of APIs Exist?
1. REST API
REST (short for Representational State Transfer) is a web services API. REST
APIs are crucial for modern web applications, including Netflix, Uber, Amazon,
etc. For an API to be RESTful, it must adhere to the following rules:
Stateless—A REST API is, by nature, a stateless Client-Server
Architecture
Uniform Interface—A client and server should communicate with one
another via HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) using URIs (Unique
Resource Identifiers), CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete), and JSON
(JavaScript Object Notation) conventions.
Client-Server—The client and server should be independent of each
other. The changes you make on the server shouldn’t affect the client
and vice versa.
Cache—The client should cache the responses as this improves the
user experience by making them faster and more efficient.
Layered—The API should support a layered architecture, with each
layer contributing to a clear hierarchy. Each layer should be loosely
coupled and allow for encapsulation. APIs play a vital role in the
development of any application. And REST has become the preferred
standard for building applications that communicate over the network.
5 Amazing Areas in Which You Can Implement AI APIs
1) Image upscaling
If your application incorporates images from different sources, you may have
encountered a situation where an image source doesn’t have the necessary
resolution or quality to satisfy the needs of your application. This is where an
AI upscaling service, such as Let’s Enhance, may be beneficial. Using ML
models that have been trained on millions of images, their AI can predict the
missing detail in your images and return a version of your image source that
has eight times the resolution of that source. It also removes compression
fragments and can enhance the color of images. Looking at the
results almost feels like there is some sort of magic at play. Their API accepts
images from AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, or any HTTP source out of the
box.
4. Enhancing a low resolution image (left) to high resolution (right) using an AI
upscaling API
2) Content Moderation
Any digital product that incorporates user-generated content is susceptible to
inappropriate content being added. Traditionally, this would require
administrative oversight, moderators, or community self-policing.
Fortunately, AI tools, such as the Microsoft Azure Content Moderator, are now
available to automate the review of text, images, and video content. This can
detect offensive, profane, and adult content across different content types in
more than 100 languages. It includes its own human review tool in cases
where the AI engine does not have strong confidence to detect inappropriate
content. This helps the AI learn and improve its prediction confidence over
time. The Microsoft Azure Content Moderator can be integrated into your
applications via Azure’s API or via their SDKs for Python, Node.js, and .NET.
3) Product recognition
Image and facial recognition are the most well known applications of AI.
Fortunately, this is also one of the use cases where building your own ML
model is relatively easy to do, opening up use cases that previously weren’t
easily solvable. For example, we’re currently working with an industrial
manufacturing client who needs their mobile application to be able to identify
their industrial devices. Traditionally, this would need to be done by scanning
a barcode or QR code. Now it is possible for a trained AI engine to identify a
product simply by pointing the camera at the device. Google’s Cloud AutoML
Vision provides a complete toolset for non-AI experts to train ML models with
5. custom image data that can subsequently be used in Google’s Vision API.
Upload your product catalog, label images correctly, and AutoML handles the
rest. AutoML Vision even allows exporting the models to edge formats, such
as Tensorflow Lite and Core ML, which can run on mobile devices directly
without needing to engage an API. Because data does not need to be sent
back to Google’s servers, image recognition on mobile devices is
substantially more expedient.
4) Data extraction
Some digital products rely heavily on data collected from sources on the web,
but those sources don’t always provide structured data that can be easily
ingested. This can result in large manual efforts with “scraping engines” that
constantly need to be modified as the content sources evolve. The better
solution is to use an AI service that analyzes a website and processes it into
structured content that can then be consumed via an API. Diffbot AI can
analyze many types of web content and extract structured content. For
example, if we needed to extract the post content from a user forum, Diffbot
will return the posts on the page in cleanly structured JSON format as if we
had just retrieved the content from the website’s database. Diffbot works on
articles, discussions, image pages, product pages, and videos.
5) Voice Control
AI voice assistants have become standard in many households and users are
becoming increasingly more comfortable interacting with them on a daily
basis. Voice is also becoming a more prevalent input on mobile devices. If
you believe that integrating voice control in your digital product could benefit
your users, leveraging a Natural Language Processing (NLP) API is the easiest
way to get access to those capabilities. Wit.ai provides an NLP API that
accepts streaming audio in over 130 languages and returns commands that
are tailored to your application’s functionality. Training and improving intent
detection are all handled through their user-friendly web interface, avoiding
the need to build a complex custom ML model.
Mapping the Future of APIs & Their Role in the Technology
Industry
APIs are the integration method of choice in the distributed cloud-native
development environment, offering a wide range of benefits to developers
and the applications they are building, including:
Accelerated Development: APIs simplify otherwise complex
connections, making it easier for developers to react fast to changing
needs, and ultimately accelerating the development cycle.
Reusability: API designs can be reused like building blocks, supporting
scalability and further expediting the development process.
Automation: APIs enable automation by simplifying communication
between applications and services, eliminating the need for manual
processes, phone calls, faxes, and time-consuming point-to-point
integrations.
6. Collaboration: In many cases, internal applications need to connect
with external applications or systems. APIs facilitate collaboration with
third parties by serving as a simple interface between applications
both inside and outside the network that were not originally designed
to communicate, supporting partnerships that would otherwise not be
possible.
Innovation: Custom integration between applications can be costly and
time-consuming to establish and maintain. The lower cost and
simplicity of APIs fosters experimentation and innovation.
APIs for Today and the Future: Essential Use Cases
Click here to get started with Vonage
—
Now Let Me Introduce Your Business
To Vonage!
What is Vonage API Technology and Why do You Need One?
These days, everyone says they have APIs...but very few of our competitors
have the depth or breadth of our portfolio. Developers can use SMS, voice,
video, verify, messaging APIs (and then some) to build outstanding
embedded or mobile communications experiences.
Throw in some AI and outstanding developer tools and documentation, and
you'll be ready to develop amazing customer experiences that delight both
your team and customers at scale.
What are the Benefits of Vonage API Management Software in
Marketing?
Our APIs let you customize for the communications your customers need.
Want to integrate your business phone system or contact center with your
CRM? For popular apps, like Salesforce, Microsoft Teams, and GSuite, we
offer deep, embedded integrations. As your business grows or your needs
evolve, we'll scale with you: you can easily add a phone system, a contact
center, or build an embedded solution that plays nicely with everything else
(your IT teams will thank you.)
Click here to get started with Vonage
99.999% uptime reliability* means your teams and contact center
agents can stay connected and efficient, wherever they are.
7. Our highly distributed architecture provides flexibilty for massive scale-out
capabilities, while multi-level fail-safes with cloud backup minimize call drops,
data loss and static. Click here to
get started with Vonage