Overview
Accelerate multimodal AI app and agent development
Azure Content Understanding helps enterprises transform unstructured multimodal data into insights.
- Derive meaningful insights from diverse types of input data, ranging from text, documents, audio, images, video, and AI agents.
- Achieve precise, high-quality data for downstream applications with sophisticated AI methods such as scheme extraction and grounding.
- Streamline and unify pipelines of varied data types into a single streamlined workflow, reducing overall costs and accelerating time to value.
- See how businesses and call center operators generate valuable insights from call recordings to track essential KPIs, enhance product experiences, and respond to customer inquiries more swiftly and accurately.
Features
Multimodal AI: Transforming data into insights
Multimodal data ingestion
Ingest various modalities—such as documents, images, audio, or video—and use a range of AI models available in Azure AI to transform input data into structured output that can be easily processed and analyzed by downstream applications.
Customizable output schemas
Customize the schemas of extracted results to meet your specific needs. Tailor the format and structure of summaries, insights, or features to include only the most relevant details—such as key points or timestamps—from video or audio files.
Confidence scores
Utilize confidence scores to reduce human intervention and increase accuracy with continuous improvement through user feedback.
Output ready for downstream applications
Automate business processes by building enterprise AI apps or agentic workflows. Use outputs that downstream applications can consume for reasoning with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
Grounding
Ensure the information extracted, inferred, or abstracted is represented in the underlying content.
Bring your own model
Empower your enterprise with the new bring your own (BYO) option in Azure Content Understanding—designed for flexibility, control, and cost transparency. Seamlessly integrate your own Azure subscription and models while preserving multimodal performance across documents, images, audio, and video.
Security
Embedded security and compliance
34,000
Full-time equivalent engineers dedicated to security initiatives at Microsoft.
15,000
Partners with specialized security expertise.
>100
Compliance certifications, including over 50 specific to global regions and countries.
Pricing
Flexible pricing to meet your needs
Pay for only what you use. There are no upfront costs with Azure Content Understanding pay-as-you-go pricing. Pricing is based on input (content extraction) and output (field extraction) costs.
Use cases
Apply Content Understanding to a variety of use cases
Discover how others are leveraging Content Understanding.
CUSTOMER STORIES
Get insights from leading brands
Discover how organizations are driving innovation with our solutions.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
- Azure Content Understanding in Foundry Tools (formerly Azure AI services) helps enterprises accelerate multimodal AI app development in the age of generative AI. Content Understanding takes diverse types of input data—text, audio, images, documents, and video—and enables organizations to build generative AI solutions seamlessly with the latest models available. AI can already analyze docs, build bots, and recognize faces. Content Understanding offers a new opportunity for enterprises to develop applications that can combine all of these using prebuilt templates designed to address the most common use cases, or they can build custom models to address domain-specific or enterprise-specific use cases—all without ever requiring specialized generative AI skills such as prompt engineering. The service allows enterprises to bring their domain expertise and build automation workflows, continuously improving the output and always ensuring robust accuracy. Azure Content Understanding is built using industry-leading Azure enterprise security, data privacy, and responsible AI guidelines.
- Azure Content Understanding—formerly part of Azure AI services—is now Azure Content Understanding in Foundry Tools. This change is part of a broader platform unification under Azure AI Foundry, aligning these services with how today’s developers build intelligent, agentic applications.
Content Understanding still offers the same powerful capabilities, like extracting structured insights from multimodal data (text, audio, images, video), grounding information, and automating schema generation. But it’s now a core tool within the Foundry ecosystem, designed to work seamlessly with other tools like Speech, Translator, and Document Intelligence.
This renaming helps clarify how Content Understanding fits into the Foundry platform, making it easier to discover, orchestrate, and integrate into modern AI workflows for document automation, customer insights, and agentic reasoning. - Content Understanding enables developers to incorporate data types across modalities simultaneously into their existing apps and deploy custom models for their enterprise. It significantly simplifies generative AI solution development for multimodal scenarios and removes the manual effort to switch to the latest model upon release. It accelerates time-to-value with multiple modalities simultaneously analyzed in a unified workflow.
- Check out Content Understanding in the Azure AI Foundry.
- Pay for only what you use. There are no upfront costs with Content Understanding pay-as-you-go pricing. Pricing is based on input (content extraction) and output (field extraction) costs.
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