Azure Search Power Skills

Power Skills are a collection of useful functions to be deployed as custom skills for Azure Cognitive Search. The skills can be used as templates or starting points for your own custom skills, or they can be deployed and used as they are if they happen to meet your requirements. We also invite you to contribute your own work by submitting a pull request.

Skills

This project provides the following custom skills:

Skill	Description	Type	Language	Environment	Deployment
GeoPointFromName	retrieves coordinates from place names and addresses.	Geography			ARM Template
AcronymLinker	provides definitions for known acronyms.	Text			ARM Template
Anonymizer	Uses Presidio to analyze and anonymize PII entities.	Text			Manual
BingEntitySearch	finds rich and structured information about public figures, locations, or organizations.	Text			ARM Template
CustomEntityLookup	finds custom entity names in text. A custom skill implementation of the custom entity lookup skill, consider using in the cognitive skill instead of this custom skill implementation.	Text			ARM Template
CustomNER	extracts your custom entities, using Natural Language Processing with Text Analytics Custom NER	Text			ARM Template
CustomTextClassifier	extracts your custom text classification, using Natural Language Processing with Text Analytics Custom Text Classification	Text			Arm Template
Distinct	de-duplicates a list of terms.	Text			ARM Template
Summarizer	Uses a HuggingFace/FaceBook BART model to summarize text BART-Large-CNN.	Text			Manual
TextAnalyticsForHealth	A wrapper for the Text Analytics for Health API	Text			ARM Template
TextQualityWatchdog	Uses a pretrained language model to detect low quality text extracted during document cracking	Text			Manual
Tokenizer	extracts non-stop words from a text.	Text
AbbyyOCR	OCR to extract text from images using ABBYY Cloud OCR.	Vision			ARM Template
FormRecognizer	Use Form Recognizer to analyze a document. Form Recognizer skill supports the following model types Layout, Invoice, Receipt, ID, Business Card, General key value pairs, Custom Form	Vision			Manual
AutoMLVisionClassifier	Gets your latest Data Labelling AML AutoML Vision model and runs inference on it	Vision			Manual
CustomVision	classifies documents using Custom Vision models.	Vision			ARM Template
HocrGenerator	transforms the result of OCR into the hOCR format.	Vision			ARM Template
ImageClustering	Uses clustering to automatically group and label images	Vision			Manual
ImageSegmentation	Breakdown a full image or PDF page in subimages and upload them on Azure Blob Storage	Vision			Manual
ImageSimilarity	Uses ResNet to find the top-n most similar images	Vision			Manual
P&ID Parser	Extracts equipment tags and text blocks from piping and instrumentation diagrams	Vision			Manual
DecryptBlobFile	downloads, decrypts and returns a file that was previously encrypted and stored in Azure Blob Storage.	Utility			ARM Template
GetFileExtension	returns the filename and extension as separate values allowing you to filter on document type.	Utility			ARM Template
ImageStore	Stores and fetches base64-encoded images to and from blob storage. The knowledge store is a cleaner implementation of the pattern to save images to storage.	Utility			ARM Template
Open AI Embeddings	Generates vector embeddings through the Azure Open AI service	Vector			Manual
HelloWorld	A minimal skill that can be used as a starting point or template for your own skills.	Template			ARM Template
PythonFastAPI	A production web server and api scaffold for a python power skill	Template			Terraform template

Getting Started

Prerequisites

In order to use the functions in this project, you'll need an active Azure subscription. Most of the functions can be used on their own for quick evaluation and experimentation, but they are meant to be used as part of an Azure Cognitive Search pipeline. Each function may also add its own specific requirements, such as API keys for services they leverage.

Visual Studio 2019 is recommended, but not required. You need a recent version of the C# compiler. Postman is highly recommended as a way to experiment and test skills.

Installation and deployment

If using Visual Studio with the Azure workload installed, no installation is required, and the functions can just be run locally using F5.

Deployment of a function to Azure can be done through Visual Studio, the Deploy to Azure button, or continuous deployment.

Some functions may require setting environment variables or configuration entries. Please refer to the readme file in the function's directory.

Quickstart

1. Clone the repository
2. Open the PowerSkills solution in Visual Studio
3. Set the project for the function to test as the startup project
4. Hit F5
5. Experiment with calling the function using Postman

You can also create your own skills using our Hello World template skill as a starting point or if you are using python our FastAPI template skill.

Up for grabs

Here are a few suggestions of simple contributions to get you started:

• Improve documentation: sample code, better documentation are great ways to improve your understanding of existing code and to help other do the same.
• Configuration: some skills can be configured through application settings and environment variables. Some others still have hard-coded configuration in the code, that could be moved to be easier to configure.
• For skills that rely on an external Azure resource (such as Bing Entity Search), improve the deployment file so it gives the user the option to create and configure that service automatically.

Resources

• Contribution guidelines
• Azure Search
• Azure Functions
• JFK Files
• Knowledge Mining Solution Accelerator Guide