One of the most groundbreaking breakthroughs in recent years is artificial intelligence (AI). Its impact is set to grow even more in 2023. It is transforming the way businesses operate. AI is becoming an essential tool for businesses in various industries. Although, building AI capabilities from scratch can take time and effort.

The Azure OpenAI service provides REST API access to OpenAI's powerful language models including the GPT-3, Codex and Embeddings model series. These models can be easily adapted to your specific task including but not limited to content generation, summarization, semantic search, and natural language to code translation. Users can access the service through REST APIs, Python SDK, or our web-based interface in the Azure OpenAI Studio. At Microsoft, we're committed to the advancement of AI driven by principles that put people first. Generative models such as the ones available in the Azure OpenAI service have significant potential benefits, but without careful design and thoughtful mitigations, such models have the potential to generate incorrect or even harmful content.

Azure AI is driving innovation and improving experiences for employees, users, and customers in a variety of ways, from increasing workday productivity to promoting inclusion and accessibility. The success of Azure AI--featuring Azure Cognitive Services, Azure Machine Learning, and Azure OpenAI Service--is built on a foundation of Microsoft Research, a wide range of Azure products that have been tested at scale within Microsoft apps, and Azure customers who use these services for the benefit of their end users. As 2023 begins, we are excited to highlight 10 use cases where Azure AI is utilized within Microsoft and beyond. Speech transcription and captioning in Microsoft Teams is powered by Azure Cognitive Services for Speech. Microsoft achieved human parity in conversational speech recognition when it reached an error rate of 5.9 percent.

Beyond common features like ML and automation, CRM products can vary dramatically as each vendor takes AI in its own direction. The following AI-powered CRM platforms -- including Salesforce Einstein, IMB Watson and Azure Cognitive Services -- have their own strengths and weaknesses. Salesforce Einstein is the vendor's AI that powers many features in the Salesforce Customer Success Platform. Einstein's weaknesses include modest visualization features and limited or unproven utility beyond the sales and marketing domains. IBM Watson is an AI system that organizations can apply in various use cases, such as advertising, customer service, financial operations and sales.

With Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services for Speech, customers can build voice-enabled apps confidently and quickly in more than 140 languages. We make it easy for customers to transcribe speech to text (STT) with high accuracy, produce natural-sounding text-to-speech (TTS) voices, and translate spoken audio. In the past few years, we are inspired by the ways customers seek our customization features to fine-tune speech recognition to their use cases. As our speech technology continues to change and evolve, we want to introduce four custom speech-to-text capabilities and their respective customer use cases. With these features, you can evaluate and improve the speech-to-text accuracy for your applications and products.

Dentsu Metaversity for Microsoft Power Skills – Powerup Power Skills with new starter inductions, employee training, enabling teams anywhere to upskill and gain new competencies through the full suite of Microsoft 365 products, Text to speech and forthcoming Microsoft Designer capabilities. Microsoft Retail Education – a space for retailers and brands to learn more about Microsoft Dynamics 365 and dentsu's ShopNXT retail innovations. Lounge - A virtual "room" where brands can connect through their professional LinkedIn identities to recruit, network, and engage with prospective buyers and customers. Ecosia Forest - Provides overall education on Ecosia - the search engine that plants trees where they are needed most, with over 160 million trees planted to date, powered by Microsoft. AI-Powered Virtual Human - our full experience will be guided by "Neva," an AI-powered virtual human created in collaboration with HeadOffice.space.

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.

Digital evidence appears in nearly 90 percent of all crimes committed today.1 This is a massive increase. Only 20 years ago it was unusual to have digital evidence at the center of a case. It is now a big part of what juries and judges expect to see as part of the evidence that proves innocence or guilt. To learn more about how Microsoft technology can help, visit our booth 5410 at the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) Annual Conference 2022 in Dallas, Texas from October 15 to 18.

Microsoft and Meta are extending their ongoing AI partnership, with Meta selecting Azure as "a strategic cloud provider" to accelerate its own AI research and development. Microsoft officials shared more details about the latest on the Microsoft-Meta partnership on Day 2 of the Microsoft Build 2022 developers conference. Microsoft and Meta -- back when it was still known as Facebook -- announced the ONNX (Open Neural Network Exchange) format in 2017 in the name of enabling developers to move deep-learning models between different AI frameworks. Microsoft open sourced the ONNX Runtime, which is the inference engine for models in the ONNX format, in 2018. Today, Meta officials said they'll be using Azure to accelerate research and development across the Meta AI group.

If you want to begin using machine learning in your applications, Microsoft offers several different ways to jumpstart development. One key technology, Microsoft's Azure Cognitive Services, offers a set of managed machine learning services with pretrained models and REST API endpoints. These models offer most of the common use cases, from working with text and language, to recognizing speech and images. Machine learning is still evolving, with new models being released and new hardware to help speed up inferencing, and so Microsoft regularly updates its Cognitive Services. The latest major update, announced at Build 2022, features a lot of changes to its tools for working with text, bringing three different services under one umbrella.