As we've discussed, AI is a tool whose usefulness spans the practical and inspirational. We can sometimes see the reach of its capabilities even within a single app. For example, consider an application which could translate signage in a foreign language. Such an application would be useful for tourists on vacation, or could even help doctors save lives as they travel out to foreign countries to stop an epidemic, such as ebola, before it can spread.
In this module we'll examine building a web application like this - a website we'll call Contoso Travel - step by step. Users of this website, whether travelling for business or pleasure, will be able to upload photos of street signs taken from their phones and see the translation of the sign. To build the application, we'll use Computer Vision API and Translator Text API to read the text and translate it respectively.
To build the website, you'll perform the following tasks:
- Explore app.py, the core of our application
- Create keys for Computer Vision and Translator Text
- Call Computer Vision API to extract text from photos
- Call the Translator Text API to translate text from extracted photos
- Deploy the application to Azure
To produce the application you'll use Python, one of the world's most popular programming languages, and Flask for web development. Don't worry if you're not familiar with either Python or Flask; we will cover enough in this section for you to be able to produce the website.