Highlights:

  • Azure Form Recognizer now provides a pre-built AI model that automatically extracts elements specific to contracts like parties and payment terms, previews and now supports 275 languages globally.
  • Azure Cognitive Service for Language has improved summarization and language support to make it simpler for users to gain knowledge from business documents and interactions and take appropriate action.

At Ignite 2022, Microsoft Azure made several improvements to its AI services. The business claims that the improvements would enable individuals to “work smarter, not harder by bringing more intelligence, insights and value to the hands of customers.”

Updates to the product include new improvements in Azure Applied AI Services that will help customers automate tedious tasks and serve end users in multiple languages across the globe; updates to Azure Cognitive Services to “enrich and simplify” the creation of AI apps with pre-built models and text-to-image generation; and new abilities in Azure Machine Learning that help developers and data scientists of all skill levels to be more productive and help advance responsible AI deployment.

In the last 12 months, Azure AI has been used by more than 85% of Fortune 100 firms across various sectors and use cases. However, John Montgomery, corporate vice president at Azure AI, explained that the present economic climate provides the background for the upgrades, causing businesses to struggle with doing more with less and figuring out how to make employees more productive and pleased.

Montgomery said, “There is significant pressure. Most companies I talk with are looking at what they have to do with their people and had hiring ramps that are being changed or reduced.”

He added, “That has led to a tremendous acceleration of AI adoption in enterprises, helped by technologies that focus on speed and scale. The scale we see with customers is pretty significant, but one change we’re seeing in the last year is time to market and execution. It’s been a big hindrance for adopting AI, but we’re seeing customers being able to adopt AI more quickly.”

These are highlights of eight new Microsoft Azure AI updates:

Prebuilt AI model in Microsoft Azure’s Form Recognizer

Azure Form Recognizer now provides a prebuilt AI model that automatically extracts elements specific to contracts like parties and payment terms and previews and now supports 275 languages globally.

For instance, H and amp;R Block, which processes over 12 million tax returns annually, uses AI and automation to simplify tax filing. They are utilizing the prebuilt W2 model in Azure Form Recognizer (an Azure Applied AI Service), which accurately and automatically pulls data from W2s for clients with a greater degree of accuracy.

Azure OpenAI service offers DALL-E 2

DALL-E 2 is coming to Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service through an invitation-only release, enabling a few Azure AI users to create unique pictures using text or images.

Customers will be able to produce original content supported by Azure’s cloud AI infrastructure, enterprise-grade security, and compliance features thanks to the addition of DALL-E 2 to the Azure OpenAI Service.

Expanded summarization and language support

Azure Cognitive Service for Language has improved summarization and language support to make it simpler for users to gain knowledge from business documents and interactions and take appropriate action.

To support their research across hundreds of various interfaces, Beiersdorf, a global skin care industry leader with names like Nivea, Coppertone, and Eucerin, sought to assist their R and amp;D team in finding, organizing, and extracting data from papers.

The business employed Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services to create an intelligent digital library. Now, it uses the Cognitive Service for Language to comprehend and summarize documents so that researchers can quickly discover what they need. Their terabytes of data are organized into categories using Azure Cognitive Search, making it simple to search.

New features in speech-to-text and text-to-speech

Azure Speech Service now offers additional functionality in speech-to-text and text-to-speech services to help customers create voice-enabled apps that are richer, more accessible, and of the highest quality.

Real-time transcriptions, closed captioning, and translation is now available in Microsoft Teams. This includes Live Translations for meeting captions with Azure AI-powered translations for 40 spoken languages.

Azure Computer Vision updates

Microsoft Azure Computer Vision now has two updates in preview. Image analysis extracts visual characteristics from images to enhance consumer accessibility and digital asset management. The product has clever cropping, object identification, and people detection.

Spatial Analysis ingests streaming footage from cameras, pulls insights, and generates events for usage by other systems, such as those in buildings and cars. These AI capabilities are built into smart cameras that transmit footage to Azure for AI processing and are available on the edge and in the cloud.

Microsoft Azure ML updates

Automated code generation is now available in the preview for all Automated Machine Learning jobs, assisting clients in constructing models more quickly and with higher quality.

Responsible AI Dashboard will soon be freely accessible, making it easier for clients to comprehend, safeguard, and manage AI models.