2021 Ignite Announcements for Azure AI
Microsoft Ignite is Microsoft’s annual gathering of technology leaders and practitioners; this year, it was hosted virtually as a 48-hour event. Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, in his keynote, shared the five attributes that will drive the next generation of innovation from the cloud:
- Ubiquitous and decentralized computing.
- Sovereign data and ambient intelligence.
- Empowered creators and communities everywhere.
- Expanded economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce.
- Trust by design.
If you were not able to join live, I encourage you to watch his keynote on demand.
In this article, I will cover the three updates from Ignite 2021 for Azure AI:
A. Semantic search capability in Azure Cognitive Search now in preview
A new semantic search capability in Azure Cognitive Search, an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered cloud search service for mobile and web app development, is now available in preview. This capability enables developers to deliver results based on user intent as opposed to a keyword-based search, which is the industry norm. Semantic search leverages some of the most advanced natural language models to improve relevance and ranking of search results. It uses concept matching, synonym search and other techniques to deliver a more personalized search experience for users.
Learn more about this update.
B. Azure Form Recognizer adds preview of data extraction and new languages
Form Recognizer, an Azure Cognitive Service, is introducing support for pre-built identification documents (IDs) and invoice extraction, plus the ability to read data in 64 additional languages (raising the total to 73).
The new pre-built IDs feature will enable automated extraction of data from worldwide passports and driver’s licenses, helping customers avoid manual data entry and improving services like online banking transactions and hotel registration.
Data extraction from invoices will further help customers extract text, key-value pairs and tables from documents to produce structured data that reflects the relationships in the original file without manual data labelling or intensive coding.
Language support will expand to 73 this month from the existing nine: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch (all generally available), and Simplified Chinese and Japanese (in preview).
Learn more about this update.
C. Azure Machine Learning adds preview of hybrid support and other capabilities
Azure Machine Learning (Azure ML), an enterprise-grade service that helps customers build and deploy models rapidly, has several new capabilities.
Azure Arc now supports Azure ML. Customers can sign up to access the preview today. More information on this announcement can be found in the Azure Hybrid, Azure Infra, Azure Migrate section.
Support for large-scale, interactive data preparation in Azure ML, backed by Azure Synapse Spark, is now available in preview. This builds upon recently released capabilities for data professionals working in Azure Synapse to seamlessly collaborate with data scientists using Azure ML. Data scientists can now prepare data and do feature engineering on big data directly from Azure ML notebooks, saving time and optimizing workflows.
Learn more about these updates.
If you weren’t able to catch the Ignite sessions live, I’d encourage you to check out all the highlights on the news page. I would recommend to view the Microsoft Ignite 2021 Book of News for announcements across different capabilities.
