API: An Unsung Hero of Digital Revolution

Let us imagine that you want to develop a cool gadget, but you don’t have any idea about how to go about doing so. For example, you want to develop an Alexa or a Siri type of device. Someone with no programming background would think on the lines that I first need to learn programming and then I will learn how to do voice recognition and then I will learn how to do natural language processing. But it is actually much more simpler than that.

People without programming background are not entirely wrong thinking that, as During courses on computer science, these subjects are taught. I remember that as part of our course in computer graphics, we had learned how to draw a line, how to draw circle and other polygonal shapes. We had also learned various artificial intelligence algorithms some 15 years back. But I don’t remember ever using those even though I would have drawn many complex shapes on the screen, and I have used some AI algorithms without exactly knowing how they really worked.

How then all of that really works. It works similar to how we drive a car without knowing how does an internal combustion engine work. We know how to press accelerator, how to steer, how to change gears  and how to apply breaks. This process is so simple that it does not even require basic education.

In programming there is a similar role played by what is known as function. You provide the input to the function and it returns you the result of the computation. And a collection of such functions with well-known and stable interfaces could be called Application Programming Interface (API). Let us again take the example of a chat bot. There are many organizations that provide online and offline services such as LUIS from Microsoft, Hangouts Chat from google and Amazon Connect chat from who else, Amazon. You just need to choose programming language of your choice and download the code to call these interfaces and do some basic programming to send the voice that you capture from your device hardware using another set of API.

What an API does that it lets you and me, who have no idea how to do speech recognition and natural language processing, do these tasks as if we are experts. It also makes it possible to scale for those few who have perfected these technologies. Actually most of programming is about using various APIs to get the task done with very basic programming skills. That’s why many students who are right out of college are able to create AI based solutions. Actually we don’t even need college for that. I think, students who are around 10 to 12 year of age are capable of learning these technologies if they put their mind to it.

So whatever new algorithms are developed they can be made available through API to others who can put those algorithms in the service of their needs and develop amazing products for you and me. This makes me think that APIs are the unsung heroes of our digital revolution.