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What does Digia's API team do and how they do it?

Digia's API team work to build better APIs to ease everyday life. In this blog we get to hear some examples of what they are working on. Read more about the technologies being used and some example cases on how those can be used. 

Are you one among those who does use Mobile APP's to pay invoices, book travel tickets, get personalized instant assistance, face recognition to pay or check the feelings of a person from an application?

Have you been wondering about how the world of API's is structured and brought to your finger tips for daily usage? This is what we have been doing here in Digia with our API team. As a young technology freak you would be curious to know how the world is bundled in your smart phone, so we thought to share the insights behind these with some examples: 

Chatbot's: Whenever we enter banking, telecom, or insurance website and ask for assistance, we are able to get personalized assistance instantly and that help is applicable for Thousands or Millions of customers round the clock. This is possible with the help of Artificial intelligence backed in Chatbots. IBM Watson is one of the technologies behind this to provide better customer service for you. 

Face Recognition: Do you ever think how cool it would be to be able to analyze the feelings of a person and improvise these to customer service, may it be in the healthcare field, restaurants or kiosks? Well, we have done this with Microsoft Azure services with the combination of logic apps, Cognitive services, Power BI and storage account- file storage.

Speech to text: At times we need services on the fly, say while taking a short walk and calling a friend on your mobile, finding route on maps or getting search results just by speaking to apps. This is a great companion for physically challenged people. Google Cloud is one of the platforms to provide this service that listens to a person’s voice at-most to perfection in different languages and converts it to a text via the Application Programming Interface (API) which feeds data to numerous applications in the desired format. 

Swagger/Open API: We use different types of APIs in our day to day life all the time. For example Google Maps, Twitter, YouTube and Amazon Product Advertising provide one of the most popular APIs. Technically when you develop such kind of APIs you need some tool through which you can do API documentation and testing. In the API team we are using Swagger to generate interactive API documentation that lets users try out the API calls directly in the browser.  It also lets to use the spec to connect API-related tools with your API. 

Swagger allows you to describe the structure of your APIs so that machines can read them. Swagger generates API documentation with friendly UI which makes it easy for everyone to understand and provide input into the design of API. Swagger is based on Open API specification. Open API specification is a standard for defining RESTful APIs.

Postman: RESTful APIs are everywhere now days but at the same time they are getting more complex to get started with: different HTTP methods, headers, cookies, dealing with file uploads or authentication with API keys, tokens, OAuth and much more. This is where the Postman App comes in! Postman allows you very quickly create a request with the required HTTP method and parameters, submit the request and easily inspect the results. In the API team we are using Postman quite frequently to perform API testing using Postman as it is handy and easy to use.

AWS (Video to text): Don’t you think how life would be easy if you would see automatic subtitles for movie or any video which you can’t understand? Amazon Transcribe can help you to achieve this goal. The main feature of Amazon Transcribe is that it has enough intelligent to recognize all different languages spoken in the video and generate subtitle from it. Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for developers to add speech-to-text capability to their applications. 

APIOps Cycles (TM): We know about DevOps, SecOps etc. similarly to these we have APIOps. We always look for some standard practices, tools that increase an organization's ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity. In the API team to achieve this goal, we are following the APIOps Cycles (TM) method in developing APIs. APIOps Cycles (TM) is a set of tools and methods for designing API Management compatible API’s with Clear business orientation and best practice architecture patterns. APIOps method uses modern and proven frameworks with a twist of our experience.

 

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