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RSS feedSeptember 2023
Computer Vision v1.0, v2.0, v2.1, v3.0, and v3.1 APIs will be retired on 13 September 2026
Target retirement date: September 13, 2026
Migrate to Azure Computer Vision 3.2 API before 13 September 2026
March 2023
Public preview: Azure Cognitive Service for Vision Powers State-of-the-Art Computer Vision Development
Extract robust insights from images and video content across multiple industry domains
October 2022
Public preview: Computer Vision Image Analysis 4.0
Get results from all Image Analysis visual features including Read (OCR) with only need one API call.
August 2022
Retirement of Computer Vision API v3.2 previews
Target retirement date: January 30, 2023
Migrate your workloads to Computer Vision API v3.2 GA before 30 January 2023.
July 2022
Responsible AI investments and safeguards for Facial Recognition
Target retirement date: July 01, 2023
The Cognitive Services team has updated our approach to facial recognition including adding a new Limited Access policy, removing AI classifiers of sensitive attributes and bolstering our investments in fairness and transparency.
May 2022
Generally available: OCR supports 164 languages in the Cognitive Services Computer Vision
Computer Vision Read API for Optical Character Recognition (OCR) announced the general availability of the new model with support for 164 languages. It’s also available as a Docker container.
March 2022
Public preview: Enhancements to Azure Form Recognizer for Azure Applied AI Services
Azure Form Recognizer now supports extraction from custom documents, W-2 forms, access to the read API, additional human languages and enhancements.
February 2022
Public preview: OCR supports 164 languages in the Cognitive Services Computer Vision
Computer Vision Read API for Optical Character Recognition (OCR), part of Cognitive Services, announces its public preview with support for new languages including Arabic, Hindi, and other regional languages with the same writing scripts. It also extends handwritten OCR support for Japanese and Korean, along with enhancements for handwritten dates, names, and amounts and general performance and AI quality enhancements.
October 2021
OCR (Read) supports 122 languages in the Cognitive Services Computer Vision public preview
Computer Vision Read API for Optical Character Recognition (OCR), part of Cognitive Services, announces its public preview with new languages including Russian, Bulgarian, other Cyrillic and more Latin languages. This release also highlight handwritten OCR support for many languages, along with enhancements for digital PDFs and Machine Readable Zone (MRZ) text in identity documents.
April 2021
Cognitive Services - New Computer Vision API v3.2 now generally available
Updated Computer Vision API now generally available to improve image tagging, content moderation, OCR language expansion, and more.
February 2021
OCR support for 73 languages in the Cognitive Services Computer Vision public preview
Computer Vision Read 3.2 API for Optical Character Recognition (OCR), part of Cognitive Services, announces its public preview with support for Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and several Latin languages, with option to use the cloud service or deploy the Docker container on premise.
October 2020
Azure Cognitive Services has achieved human parity in image captioning
Computer Vision, part of Azure Cognitive Services, now offers an updated image captioning capability that has achieved human parity based on the Novel Object Captioning at Scale (NOCAPS) benchmark.
September 2020
New Azure Cognitive Services and capabilities in preview
Preview capabilities in Azure Cognitive Services Decision, Vision, and containers categories.
August 2020
Simplified Chinese language support now available in Azure Cognitive Services Computer Vision public preview
Computer Vision Read API v3.1, part of Cognitive Services, announces its public preview with support for Simplified Chinese language.
May 2020
New Cognitive Services capabilities are now generally available
New Cognitive Services capabilities are now generally available.
February 2020
Azure Cognitive Services Computer Vision Read API v3.0 now in preview
Target availability: Q1 2020
Cognitive Services Computer Vision Read API of is now available in v3.0 (in preview). Read features the newest models for optical character recognition (OCR), allowing you to extract text from printed and handwritten documents.
September 2019
Public Preview: Computer Vision releasing 'Read' text extraction feature in containers
We are releasing our latest text understanding feature , 'Read', in Docker containers for customers to run locally.
August 2019
Cognitive Services—Azure Active Directory authentication and custom subdomains are now in preview
Target availability: Q4 2019
Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) authentication allows you to authenticate to Cognitive Services using Azure AD or user principals. This capability provides greater flexibility for managing access to Cognitive Services and makes it easier to use existing policies for credential rotation and to enforce custom password standards.
May 2019
Azure Cognitive Services capabilities that are now generally available
The following Azure Cognitive Services capabilities are now generally available: neural text to speech and computer vision read.
April 2019
Cognitive Services Custom Vision is now available
Easily customize your own state-of-the-art computer vision models for your unique use case. Just upload a few labeled images and let Custom Vision Service do the hard work. With just one click, you can export trained models to be run on a device or as Docker containers.
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