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.

This blog post was co-authored by Anny Dow, Product Marketing Manager, Azure Cognitive Services. As schools and organizations around the world prepare for a new school year, remote learning tools have never been more critical. Educational technology, and especially AI, has a huge opportunity to facilitate new ways for educators and students to connect and learn. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Immersive Reader, and shine a light on how new improvements to Azure Cognitive Services can help developers build AI apps for remote education that empower everyone. Immersive Reader is an Azure Cognitive Service within the Azure AI platform that helps readers read and comprehend text.

There's a good chance the students you're teaching today will enroll in university courses that haven't yet been created and enter jobs that don't exist. And they'll be called upon to solve some of the world's most pressing environmental, social and economic issues. We know that can feel like a lot on your shoulders, but there is plenty you can do to prepare students for success and we're here to help. Thoughtfully designed and well implemented STEM instruction builds subject-specific knowledge and fosters a growth mindset, collaboration, critical thinking and computational thinking – all vital skills for jobs of the future. We have tips to share about fun ways to participate in Hour of Code, available in Minecraft: Education Edition as a free coding lesson.

It is an exercise in stating the obvious to say we are living in a rapidly changing world, where technology is both one of the most disruptive and exciting influences on our society. Yet change is constant, and something that we have experienced forever – in the 17th century King Henry IV of France wished for all his people to have "a chicken in every pot." Fast forward 300 years to 1977 and Bill Gates' vision was for a "computer on every desk and in every home" and now with the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) it seems there is a computer in every pot and chicken! Education is not immune to the increasing influences of technology and yet after a decade working in schools and the wider education sector, I've never been more convinced that teachers are the most valuable resource a school can possess and the old scare-mongering that robots will replace them could not be further from the truth. That said, technology and AI is going to empower and enable schools and teachers to do more than ever before and this is at the heart of Microsoft's vision and is evident through increasingly smart applications designed to help educators and students alike.