Azure updates
Get the latest updates on Azure products and features to meet your cloud investment needs. Subscribe to notifications to stay informed.
RSS feedJune 2021
General availability: Azure Cognitive Services Text Analytics for Health
Now generally available, use Text Analytics for Health to detect words and phrases mentioned in unstructured text as entities in the healthcare and biomedical domain.
General availability: 6 new Locales added to Speech service to support speech transcription
Speech service has added Speech to Text support for 6 new languages and locales.
May 2021
Public preview: Azure Cognitive Services Text Analytics Adds Question Answering Feature
The new, standard Question Answering feature provides users the capability to answer questions over a passage of text without having to create knowledgebases and manage additional storage
General availability: Azure Cognitive Services Translator Document Translation feature
Now generally available, use Document Translation to translate documents at scale.
Azure Applied AI Services public preview updates for Build 2021
Azure AI is introducing a new category of services called Azure Applied AI Services. These services accelerate time-to-value in building AI solutions for common business processes. Within this category, Azure Video Analyzer is now in public preview. The service brings Live Video Analytics and Video Indexer together so developers can quickly build AI-powered video analytics solutions.
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.
Public preview: Cognitive Services- Anomaly Detector now supports multivariate anomaly detection
Enable organizations to identify anomalies across multiple variables with multivariate Anomaly Detector.
March 2021
Public preview: Cognitive Services - Form Recogniser new features
Support for 73 languages, prebuilt ID model, invoice line item extraction, tagging as table and lots more - Now in Azure Form Recogniser public preview, part of Azure Cognitive Services
Public preview: Azure Communication Services interoperability with Microsoft Teams
Azure Communication Services is now interoperable with Microsoft Teams in preview, enabling you to leverage a unified offering for both internal and external communication experiences.
February 2021
We are retiring the standard version of Custom Voice on 29th February 2024
Target retirement date: February 29, 2024
Upgrade to Custom Neural Voice.
We are retiring Azure Cognitive Services Text Analytics v2.x on 29 February 2024
Target retirement date: February 29, 2024
Transition to Azure Cognitive Services Text Analytics v3.
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.
General Availability: Custom Neural Voice, a Text-to-Speech capability within Speech Service
Improve user experiences responsibly with Custom Neural Voice, a limited access capability within Speech Service. Custom Neural voice allows you to build a custom voice font consistent with your brand and use case.
January 2021
General availability: Text Analytics' Named Entity Recognition v3 now supports 10 languages with improved AI quality
With support for more entity categories and more languages, using Text Analytics NER enables organizations to extract higher quality insights from unstructured text.
November 2020
Cognitive Services Speech adds new Neural TTS voices and general availability of Neural TTS in containers
Speech service adds 10 new neural Text to Speech (TTS) voices and announces general availability of Neural TTS in containers.
QnA Maker introduces deep learning (Public Preview)
The next version of QnA Maker introduces state-of-art deep learning technologies and advances several core capabilities like better relevance and precise answering.
October 2020
Azure Cognitive Services Translator — Canadian French language text translation now available
Use Translator to add Canadian French translation to your apps, products and workflows.
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
Azure Cognitive Services general availability updates
General availability updates in Azure Cognitive Services Decision, Speech, and containers categories.
New Azure Cognitive Services and capabilities in preview
Preview capabilities in Azure Cognitive Services Decision, Vision, and containers categories.
Azure at Microsoft Build
Get answers to your questions from Microsoft and Community experts.
Community supportRead commonly asked questions on Azure updates.
FAQFind the latest news, updates and resources for Azure partners.
Azure Partner ZoneTell us what you think of Azure and what you want to see in the future.
Provide feedbackAzure is available in more regions than any other cloud provider.
Check product availability in your region