Microsoft announces new Azure AI Platform innovations

Microsoft recently shared some new innovations for developers within its Azure AI Platform. The updates are meant to help businesses and organizations augment their own ingenuity and digital transformation efforts through new features related to search and machine learning capabilities. Cognitive Search is a new capability within the Azure Portal that uses AI to understand content and then integrate that information into Azure Search. It supports built-in file readers like PDFs and Office documents, cognitive skills for OCR like handwritten or print text, entity recognition, key phrase extraction, language detection, image analysis, and even facial recognition. So essentially, Search can pull data from a variety of Azure sources and use real knowledge and cognitive skills to organize and store the data in an index that's optimized for intuitive exploration.