What are AI APIs?
AI APIs are interfaces that let developers add artificial intelligence to their own applications without building models from scratch. Instead of training your own system, you send a request — some text, an image, audio — to a provider and get an AI result back.
What they expose
- Language — text generation, summarization, classification, and chat via large language models.
- Vision — image recognition, OCR, and content moderation.
- Speech — transcription and text-to-speech.
- Embeddings & search — semantic search and recommendation building blocks.
The major providers
The landscape includes models from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and others, plus cloud platforms like AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure. Each offers different models, pricing, and strengths.
How to choose
Picking an AI API usually comes down to four things: quality of the output for your task, latency and speed, cost (often priced per token or per request), and trust — data handling, privacy, and whether your data is used to train the provider's models. Most teams start with a strong general model and refine as they learn what their application actually needs.