Did you miss a session from MetaBeat 2022? Head over to the on-demand library for all of our featured sessions here. Today Microsoft Azure announced a variety of enhancements across its AI services at Ignite 2022. The company says the updates will help people "work smarter, not harder by bringing more intelligence, insights and value to the hands of customers." The product updates include new innovations in Azure Applied AI Services to help customers automate mundane tasks and serve end-users in multiple languages worldwide; updates to Azure Cognitive Services to "enrich and simplify" the creation of AI apps with pre-built models and text-to-image generation; and new capabilities in Azure Machine Learning that boost the productivity of developers and data scientists of all skill levels, and help further responsible AI deployment.

Coming to grips with machine learning needn't require vast amounts of labeled data, a team of data scientists, and a lot of compute time. The state of the art in modern artificial intelligence has reached a point where there are now models that are sufficiently general purpose (within their own domains, of course) that they can be dropped into your applications without additional training and customization. We've seen some of this with the evolution from Project Adam to Azure Cognitive Services. Now Microsoft is taking the next step, using that foundation to deliver a set of machine learning models that provide assistance with common tasks: Azure Applied AI Services. We've already seen some of this with the Power Platform's new document automation tool in Power Automate.

Each year, Microsoft Build is like Christmas for developers, especially those focused on the Microsoft stack. It's when they make the most exciting announcements, release the best new software, and start to solidify the roadmap of innovation for the next year. While we don't get to enjoy the conference in person this year, we do get the same great collection of announcements. This year's highlight for engineers and developers interested in machine learning is the Azure Applied AI Services. Microsoft has been Democratizing AI since 2016. Applied AI Services takes this ideal another step forward. Microsoft has already made machine learning accessible to developers through their outstanding Cognitive Services, and this offering will make certain scenarios even more accessible.