At its 14th Ability summit, which kicks off today, Microsoft is highlighting developments and collaborations across its portfolio of assistive products. Much of that is around Azure AI, including features announced yesterday like AI-powered audio descriptions and the Azure AI studio that better enables developers with disabilities to create machine-learning applications. It also showed off new updates like more languages and richer AI-generated descriptions for its Seeing AI tool, as well as new playbooks offering guidelines for best practices in areas like building accessible campuses and greater mental health support. The company is also previewing a feature called "Speak For Me," which is coming later this year. Much like Apple's Personal Voice, Speak For Me can help those with ALS and other speech disabilities to use custom neural voices to communicate.

Open-source technologies have had a profound impact on the world of AI and machine learning, enabling developers, data scientists, and organizations to collaborate, innovate, and build better AI solutions. As large AI models like GPT-3.5 and DALL-E become more prevalent, organizations are also exploring ways to leverage existing open-source models and tools without needing to put a tremendous amount of effort into building them from scratch. Microsoft Azure AI is leading this effort by working closely with GitHub and data science communities, and providing organizations with access to a rich set of open-source technologies for building and deploying cutting-edge AI solutions. At Azure Open Source Day, we highlighted Microsoft's commitment to open source and how to build intelligent apps faster and with more flexibility using the latest open-source technologies that are available in Azure AI. Recent advancements in AI propelled the rise of large foundation models that are trained on a vast quantity of data and can be easily adapted to a wide variety of applications across various industries.

There are over one billion people in the world living with disabilities, and many face barriers to employment, education, and societal inclusion. In 2021, Microsoft launched a new five-year initiative to address these challenges by focusing on three priorities: developing more accessible technology, using this technology to create opportunities for people with disabilities to enter the workforce, and building a more inclusive workplace for people with disabilities. The goal is to bridge the disability divide and tap into the untapped talent pool of people with disabilities. Digital technology can play a crucial role in improving communication, interaction, and access to information for this community. As technology continues to advance, it becomes increasingly important for companies to consider the accessibility of their products and services, to make sure people with disabilities aren't left behind.

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.

Do you want to begin a career in Artificial Intelligence? If yes, then this webinar is for you! The AI-900 certification takes you through Azure AI Fundamentals and therefore is a great first step in your AI journey. In this Free Webinar, we will introduce you to the basic concepts of Azure AI and help you understand the benefits of taking up this certification, exam preparation methods, recommended resources, and much more. We will also have our own AI experts facilitate this session to give you the best insights possible! Who Can Attend? Absolutely Anybody! What’s In It For You? 1. Learn from Microsoft Certified in-house experts who curate our training modules for industry professionals to address their unique requirements. 2. Get access to CloudThat’s Exam Ready Assessment Platform, where you can practice exam questions and assess your preparedness before taking the AZ-500 certification exam.

Azure Machine Learning, Azure Synapse Analytics and Spark using Azure Databricks are cloud services that you can use to train, deploy, automate, and manage machine learning models, all at the broad scale that the cloud provides. Azure Cognitive Services are APIs/SDKs/services available to help developers build intelligent applications without the need for AI or data science skills/knowledge. Azure Cognitive Services enable developers to easily add cognitive features such as emotion and video detection; facial, speech, and vision recognition; and speech and language understanding – into their applications. The goal of Azure Cognitive Services is to help developers create applications that can see, hear, speak, understand, and even begin to reason. The event will be held in English.

The series is designed to help you get started on a Microsoft Azure AI learning journey. Not matter your previous knowledge of AI, this actionable set of sessions will take you through what is available in Azure AI, Computer Vision and Conversational AI and give you space to ask a set of experts questions about each topic. We will only scratch the surface of what is available on Microsoft Learn and will encourage you to continue your learning between weekly sessions in the series. This series partners with the Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Fundamentals certification – if you follow this learning path you will be well on your way to taking this exam. Join us for this live learning experience where you will be guided by subject matter experts through the Learn modules below in real time along with developers around the globe.

Microsoft announced today that 12 new languages and dialects have been added to Translator. These additions mean that the service can now translate between more than 100 languages and dialects, making information in text and documents accessible to 5.66 billion people worldwide. "One hundred languages is a good milestone for us to achieve our ambition for everyone to be able to communicate regardless of the language they speak," said Xuedong Huang, Microsoft technical fellow and Azure AI chief technology officer. Translator today covers the world's most spoken languages including English, Chinese, Hindi, Arabic and Spanish. In recent years, advances in AI technology have allowed the company to grow its language library with low-resource and endangered languages, such as Inuktitut, a dialect of Inuktut that is spoken by about 40,000 Inuit in Canada.

In the last article, we learnt about LUIS - Language Understanding Intelligent Service provided by Azure and then learnt to create a conversation app. This was fundamental to create a cognitive service in Azure such that we can obtain a subscription key and endpoint to use in our application. This article focuses on following up on the app created in Azure to make a full-fledged AI Chatbot. We can learn about all these services provided in Azure for Machine Learning through the article, Azure Cognitive Services. Also read the last article, Luis – Create a conversation app this follows up on.

In this article, we'll learn about LUIS – Language Understanding Intelligent Service provided by Azure. We'll get into the details of how LUIS understands our natural language and then go ahead to build an app that can detect the intention of our text. We'll go through a step-by-step process to create a weather app that can identify if we are asking about the weather situation of any city and country. LUIS is a cloud-based service for understanding text which basically solves problems in the domain of Natural Language Processing and is simple to use. Moreover, it can easily be integrated with our software development processes.