Azure updates
Get the latest updates on Azure products and features to meet your cloud investment needs. Subscribe to notifications to stay informed.
RSS feedNovember 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.
General availability: Announcing the release of Swiss German dialect speech recognition support
Microsoft speech service just released the de-CH locale that recognizes Swiss dialects as well as standard German as part of our speech to text offering. This enables the creation of smart speech solutions tailored to Switzerland’s market needs.
August 2021
Upgrade to Text-to-Speech Neural Voice by 31 August 2024
Target retirement date: August 31, 2024
All standard Text-to-Speech voices will be retired on 31 August 2024.
July 2021
Public Preview: Form Recognizer container support
Announcing the public preview release of Form Recognizer containers. Form Recognizer is now also available in the following docker containers - Layout, Business Card, ID Document, Receipt, Invoice and Custom containers for you to run locally.
June 2021
Introducing the Ingestion Client for Azure Speech
Ingestion Client in conjunction with Azure Speech allows customers to transcribe audio files without any development effort. Whether you have few or millions of file Azure will transcribe those securely and quickly.
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
Cognitive Services - Form Recognizer adds new version in general availability
Support for 73 languages, prebuilt ID model, invoice line item extraction, table header extraction tagging as table, and more generally available in Azure Form Recognizer, part of Applied AI Services.
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.
General availability: Azure Applied AI Services
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, there are important enhancements and status updates for Azure Bot Service and Azure Metrics Advisor.
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.
General availability: Custom Translator—May new features, improvements and bug fixes
Review the Microsoft Custom Translator new features, improvements, bug fixes, and new/refreshed models for May 2021.
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 Recognizer new features
Support for 73 languages, prebuilt ID model, invoice line item extraction, tagging as table, and lots more - Now in Azure Form Recognizer public preview, part of Azure Cognitive Services
February 2021
We’re retiring the standard version of Custom Voice on 29 February 2024
Target retirement date: February 29, 2024
Upgrade to Custom Neural Voice.
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