New Speech and Vision Features in Azure Cognitive Services

• Cognitive Services, a collection of prebuilt AI Web service components that help speed development, announced new features.
• Vision features help organizations automatically caption images, improve image search, summarize video clips, and perform background removal.
• New Speech features target language-learning scenarios, enable synthetic voices, multilingual speech-to-text, and pronunciation assessments.

Azure Cognitive Services is a collection of machine learning cloud services that allow developers to add artificial intelligence (AI) to applications, with reduced up-front cost and expertise. They are less expensive to deploy and scale than comparable machine learning environments built separately, and many are available in containers for deployment on-premises. Cognitive Services machine learning services include complete models for a range of common business needs, such as image analysis, search and indexing, and anomaly detection. The services are designed to be incorporated into custom applications and processes by developers, rather than being called independently by end users. They are built using Microsoft’s internal machine learning expertise and data stores, which help provide advanced services that are beyond what most organizations can create on their own, including language translation (for over 90 languages) and speech-to-text conversion.