Microsoft’s newly-announced Power Apps Express Design capability uses AI models from Azure Cognitive Services to turn drawings, images, PDFs and Figma design files into applications. Microsoft also announced this week that the Azure OpenAI Service is now available in preview. Those in the preview will be able to access different models from OpenAI, including the GPT-3 base series (Ada, Babbage, Curie and DaVinci), Codex series and embedding models, and combine them with the enterprise capabilities of Azure. In 2019, Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI in exchange for commitments from OpenAI to make Microsoft its “preferred partner for commercializing new AI technologies.” Another Microsoft Cognitive Service, the Cognitive Service for Language, now offers summarization for documents and conversations. This could prove useful for call center usage, Microsoft officials suggested. Microsoft is making new Language Service capabilities generally available, including custom-named entity recognition, which can help developers organize and categorize text with a customer’s domain-specific labels, such as a support ticket or invoice. Microsoft also announced the Azure Machine Learning responsible AI dashboard is in preview. This capability will help developers and data scientists more easily implement responsible AI, Microsoft officials said. Microsoft’s current set of AI models, include Turing for rich language understanding, Z-Code for language translation and Florence for visual recognition. Its family of Azure Cognitive Services include building-block services for Vision, Speech, Language, Decision, plus its OpenAI service. And among the existing Azure Applied AI Services are Cognitive search, Form Recognizer, Immersive Reader, Bot Service and Video Analyzer.
