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May 2022

May 12

Generally available: OCR supports 164 languages in the Cognitive Services Computer Vision

NOW AVAILABLE

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.

  • Azure AI Vision
  • Azure AI services
  • Features

October 2021

Oct 18

OCR (Read) supports 122 languages in the Cognitive Services Computer Vision public preview

IN 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.

  • Azure AI Vision
  • Azure AI services
  • Features

February 2021

Feb 9

OCR support for 73 languages in the Cognitive Services Computer Vision public preview

IN 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.

  • Azure AI services
  • Azure AI Vision
  • Services
  • Features

August 2020

Aug 20

Simplified Chinese language support now available in Azure Cognitive Services Computer Vision public preview

IN PREVIEW

Computer Vision Read API v3.1, part of Cognitive Services, announces its public preview with support for Simplified Chinese language.

  • Azure AI Vision
  • Services
  • Features

February 2020

Feb 11

Azure Cognitive Services—New types added to Named Entity Recognition v3

IN PREVIEW

The Named Entity Recognition (NER) v3 service (in preview) of Cognitive Services Text Analytics now has new entity types available, expanding the detection of general and personal information entities found in text.

  • Azure AI services
  • Language service
  • Services

August 2019

Aug 7

Cognitive Services—Azure Active Directory authentication and custom subdomains are now in preview

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.

  • Azure AI services
  • Security
  • Services
  • Features

June 2018

Jun 7

Cognitive Services Speech SDK June 2018 update

Cognitive Services Speech SDK 0.4.0 has been released with additional functionalities of audio input stream support and detailed output format support, along with bug fixes.

  • Azure AI services
  • SDK and Tools

May 2018

May 21

Microsoft Cognitive Services | Custom Vision Service API

IN PREVIEW

Custom Vision Service API aims to identify trained objects and show their location within images.

  • Azure AI services
  • Features
May 21

Microsoft Cognitive Services | Computer Vision API

IN PREVIEW

Computer Vision API represents a collection of state-of-the-art image-processing algorithms, designed to return information based on visual content and to help generate suitable thumbnails.

  • Azure AI services
  • Features
May 21

Microsoft Cognitive Services | Bing Visual Search API

NOW AVAILABLE

Bing Visual Search API is a new service that delivers intelligent image understanding capabilities from Bing.

  • Azure AI services
  • Features
May 21

Microsoft Cognitive Services | Bing Statistics

NOW AVAILABLE

The Bing Statistics add-in provides metrics such as call volume, top queries, API response, code distribution, and market distribution.

  • Azure AI services
  • Features
May 21

Microsoft Cognitive Services | Bing Custom Search API

NOW AVAILABLE

Bing Custom Search API is an easy-to-use, ad-free search solution that lets you build a search experience and query content on your website or across a selected set of websites or domains.

  • Azure AI services
  • Features
May 21

Microsoft Cognitive Services | Language Understanding speech to intent

NOW AVAILABLE

Language Understanding (LUIS), a machine learning-based service, offers simple tools to build your own language understanding models (intents/entities) to help any bot or app provide natural language-based user interactions.

  • Azure AI services
  • Features
May 21

Microsoft Cognitive Services | QnA Maker API

NOW AVAILABLE

QnA Maker API provides a web-based service to train AI to respond to questions in a natural, conversational way.

  • Azure AI services
  • Features
May 21

Microsoft Cognitive Services | Microsoft Speech Services

IN PREVIEW

Microsoft Speech Services, with an important set of updates, lets you access speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and speech translation APIs in one unified offer on the Azure portal.

  • Azure AI services
  • Features

December 2017

Dec 15

Azure Bot Service and Language Understanding (LUIS)

NOW AVAILABLE

Microsoft Cognitive Services and Azure Bot Service enable you to augment the next generation of chatbots with the ability to see, hear, speak, understand, and interpret needs using natural methods of communication. Language Understanding (LUIS) and Azure Bot Service are both now generally available on the Azure portal.

  • Features

November 2017

Nov 9

Azure SQL Database automatic tuning improvements

NOW AVAILABLE

Announcing two new improvements for Automatic tuning in Azure SQL Database.

  • Features

May 2017

May 11

Microsoft Cognitive Services—Custom Vision Service

IN PREVIEW

Custom Vision Service will soon be available in public preview. It's a new, easy-to-use, customizable web service that will learn to recognize specific content in imagery, powered by state-of-the-art machine-learning neural networks that become smarter with training.

  • Azure AI services
  • Features
May 11

Microsoft Cognitive Services—Video Indexer

IN PREVIEW

Video Indexer will soon be available free in preview. This new service will represent one of the industry’s most comprehensive video AI services.

  • Azure AI services
  • Features
May 11

Microsoft Cognitive Services—Custom Decision Service

IN PREVIEW

Custom Decision Service will soon be available in preview. This new service will help you create intelligent systems with a cloud-based contextual decision-making API that will adapt with experience.

  • Azure AI services
  • Features

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