In the latest tutorial posted to the SitePoint PHP blog author Wern Ancheta shows you how to integrate your application with the Microsoft Text Analytics API, a service offered by the company putting machine learning to work on things like keyword extraction, topic detection and language detection.

With the explosion of machine learning services in recent years, it has become easier than ever for developers to create “smart apps”. In this article, I’ll introduce you to Microsoft’s offering for providing machine-learning capabilities to apps. Specifically, you’ll learn about the Text Analytics API and build an app to enhance the understanding of online sellers when it comes to their customers.

The tutorial then introduces the Microsoft Cognitive Services API and, more specifically, the Text Analytics API that they'll be hooking the application in to. They walk you through getting an API key for the service, creating an "account" for the application you're working with and deploying it for immediate use. They introduce the functionality of the API with a few "play" examples of each API offered before getting into the creation of their sample application - a tool that reviews the contents of customer feedback, looking for key phrases and returns highlighted versions with what it sees as important.