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RSS feedOctober 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.
September 2022
Migrate to conversational language understanding before Language Understanding (LUIS) is retired on 1 October 2025
Target retirement date: October 01, 2025
Language Understanding (LUIS) will be retired on 1 October 2025
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.
June 2022
Generally available: Azure NC A100 v4 virtual machines for AI
Perfect for a range of AI workloads, this new virtual machines series can give you a significant performance boost over our previous NC generation series.
General availability: Conversational language understanding
Conversational language understanding includes multilingual transformer-based models as the underlying model architecture and results in significant accuracy improvements over its predecessor, LUIS.
May 2022
Public preview: Azure Cognitive Services updates
Azure Cognitive Services is announcing the following preview updates at Build: Azure OpenAI Service and summarization capabilities in Azure Cognitive Service for Language.
Generally available: Azure Cognitive Service for Language
Cognitive Service for Language now includes custom named entity recognition and custom text classification.
Public preview: New modern capabilities for Azure SQL Database
Simplify and expedite application development and reduce time-to-market with new features for Azure SQL Database.
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
General availability: Azure Cognitive Search implements debug sessions
Streamline your Cognitive Search operations with debug sessions for building, testing, and modifying skillsets.
Azure QnA Maker will be retired on 31 March 2025
Target retirement date: March 31, 2025
Migrate to custom question answering before Azure QnA Maker is retired on 31 March 2025.
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.
Public preview: Anomaly Detector adds synchronous multivariate detection and improved anomaly interpretation
Start using Anomaly Detector’s multivariate detection synchronously for quicker response, easier operations, and more informative result interpretation to help you analyze root causes.
January 2022
Public preview: Semantic Search update
Semantic Search, a feature of Azure Cognitive Search, is now available for direct configuration in the Azure Portal.
November 2021
Private preview: Azure OpenAI Service combines access to powerful GPT-3 language models with Azure’s enterprise capabilities
Apply advanced language models to a variety of use cases with Azure OpenAI Service.
Azure Applied AI Services | Azure Cognitive Search updates now generally available
Azure Cognitive Search has expanded language and regional availability.
Azure Cognitive Service for Language now generally available
Azure Cognitive Service for Language provides high-quality natural language capabilities, from sentiment analysis and entity extraction to automated question answering.
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.
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