Nested virtualization on Azure : a step-by-step guide
This article serves as a practical guide for developers and engineers to enable and configure nested virtualization on Azure. Nested virtualization allows running Hyper-V inside a virtual machine, providing enhanced flexibility and scalability for various development and data science applications. The guide walks through selecting the right Azure VM, setting up the environment, and installing Docker Desktop for efficient container management. It also addresses common troubleshooting tips to ensure a smooth setup. Whether you're working with complex machine learning models or developing applications, this guide will help you maximize the potential of nested virtualization on Azure.Azure AI Cloud Skills Challenge is LIVE!
The clock is ticking! Join our Azure AI Cloud Skills Challenges to earn a free exam voucher TL;DR: Time is running out to complete one of our four AI Cloud Skills Challenges! Finish one before April 19 th to receive 100% off the cost of a related certification exam from Microsoft.
Announcing conversational PII detection service’s general availability in Azure AI language
We are ecstatic to share the release of general availability (GA) support for our Conversational PII redaction service in English-language contexts. GA support ensures better Azure SLA support, production environment support, as well as enterprise-grade security...The Conversational PII redaction service expands upon the Text PII redaction service, supporting customers looking to identify, categorize, and redact sensitive information such as phone numbers and email addresses in unstructured text...These services can help to detect sensitive information and protect an individual’s identity and privacy in both generative and non-generative AI applications which are critical for highly regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare or government, enabling our customers to adhere to the highest standards of data privacy, security, and compliance.
The Azure Multimodal AI & LLM Processing Solution Accelerator
The Azure Multimodal AI & LLM Processing Accelerator is your one-stop-shop for all backend AI+LLM processing use cases like content summarization, extraction, classification and enrichment. This single accelerator supports all types of input data (text, documents, audio, image, video etc) and combines the best of Azure AI Services and LLMs to achieve reliable, consistent and scalable automation of tasks.Deploying GPT-4o AI Chat app on Azure via Azure AI Services – a step-by-step guide
Are you ready to revolutionize your business with cutting-edge AI technology? Dive into our comprehensive step-by-step guide on deploying a GPT-4o AI Chat app using Azure AI Services. Discover how to harness the power of advanced natural language processing to create interactive, human-like chat experiences. From setting up your Azure account to deploying your AI model and customizing your chat app, this guide covers it all. Unleash the potential of AI in your business and stay ahead of the curve with the latest advancements from Microsoft Azure. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to transform your workflows and elevate customer interactions to new heights!Announcing Azure AI Content Understanding: Transforming Multimodal Data into Insights
Solve Common GenAI Challenges with Content Understanding As enterprises leverage foundation models to extract insights from multimodal data and develop agentic workflows for automation, it's common to encounter issues like inconsistent output quality, ineffective pre-processing, and difficulties in scaling out the solution. Organizations often find that to handle multiple types of data, the effort is fragmented by modality, increasing the complexity of getting started. Azure AI Content Understanding is designed to eliminate these barriers, accelerating success in Generative AI workflows. Handling Diverse Data Formats: By providing a unified service for ingesting and transforming data of different modalities, businesses can extract insights from documents, images, videos, and audio seamlessly and simultaneously, streamlining workflows for enterprises. Improving Output Data Accuracy: Deriving high-quality output for their use-cases requires practitioners to ensure the underlying AI is customized to their needs. Using advanced AI techniques like intent clarification, and a strongly typed schema, Content Understanding can effectively parse large files to extract values accurately. Reducing Costs and Accelerating Time-to-Value: Using confidence scores to trigger human review only when needed minimizes the total cost of processing the content. Integrating the different modalities into a unified workflow and grounding the content when applicable allows for faster reviews. Core Features and Advantages Azure AI Content Understanding offers a range of innovative capabilities that improve efficiency, accuracy, and scalability, enabling businesses to unlock deeper value from their content and deliver a superior experience to their end users. Multimodal Data Ingestion and Content Extraction: The service ingests a variety of data types such as documents, images, audio, and video, transforming them into a structured format that can be easily processed and analyzed. It instantly extracts core content from your data including transcriptions, text, faces, and more. Data Enrichment: Content Understanding offers additional features that enhance content extraction results, such as layout elements, barcodes, and figures in documents, speaker recognition and diarization in audio, and more. Schema Inferencing: The service offers a set of prebuilt schemas and allows you to build and customize your own to extract exactly what you need from your data. Schemas allow you to extract a variety of results, generating task-specific representations like captions, transcripts, summaries, thumbnails, and highlights. This output can be consumed by downstream applications for advanced reasoning and automation. Post Processing: Enhances service capabilities with generative AI tools that ensure the accuracy and usability of extracted information. This includes providing confidence scores for minimal human intervention and enabling continuous improvement through user feedback. Transformative Applications Across Industries Azure AI Content Understanding is ideal for a wide range of use cases and industries, as it is fully customizable and allows for the input of data from multiple modalities. Here are just a few examples of scenarios Content Understanding is powering today: Post call analytics: Customers utilize Azure AI Content Understanding to extract analytics on call center or recorded meeting data, allowing you to aggregate data on the sentiment, speakers, and content discussed, including specific names, companies, user data, and more. Media asset management and content creation assistance: Extract key features from images and videos to better manage media assets and enable search on your data for entities like brands, setting, key products, people, and more. Insurance claims: Analyze and process insurance claims and other low-latency batch processing scenarios to automate previously time-intensive processes. Highlight video reel generation: With Content Understanding, you can automatically identify key moments in a video to extract highlights and summarize the full content. For example, automatically generate a first draft of highlight reels from conferences, seminars, or corporate events by identifying key moments and significant announcements. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG): Ingest and enrich content of any modality to effectively find answers to common questions in scenarios like customer service agents, or power content search scenarios across all types of data. Customer Success with Content Understanding Customers all over the world are already finding unique and powerful ways to accelerate their inferencing and unlock insights on their data by leveraging the multi modal capabilities of Content Understanding. Here are a few examples of how customers are unlocking greater value from their data: Philips: Philips Speech Processing Solutions (SPS) is a global leader in dictation and speech-to-text solutions, offering innovative hardware and software products that enhance productivity and efficiency for professionals worldwide. Content Understanding enables Philips to power their speech-to-result solution, allowing customers to use voice to generate accurate, ready-to-use documentation. “With Azure AI Content Understanding, we're taking Philips SpeechLive, our speech-to-result solution to a whole new level. Imagine speaking, and getting fully generated, accurate documents—ready to use right away, thanks to powerful AI speech analytics that work seamlessly with all the relevant data sources.” – Thomas Wagner, CTO Philips Dictation Services WPP: WPP, one of the world’s largest advertising and marketing services providers, is revolutionizing website experiences using Azure AI Content Understanding. SJR, a content tech firm within WPP, is leveraging this technology for SJR Generative Experience Manager (GXM) which extracts data from all types of media on a company's website—including text, audio, video, PDFs, and images—to deliver intelligent, interactive, and personalized web experiences, with the support of WPP's AI technology company, Satalia. This enables them to convert static websites into dynamic, conversational interfaces, unlocking information buried deep within websites and presenting it as if spoken by the company's most knowledgeable salesperson. Through this innovation, WPP's SJR is enhancing customer engagement and driving conversion for their clients. ASC: ASC Technologies is a global leader in providing software and cloud solutions for omni-channel recording, quality management, and analytics, catering to industries such as contact centers, financial services, and public safety organizations. ASC utilizes Content Understanding to enhance their compliance analytics solution, streamlining processes and improving efficiency. "ASC expects to significantly reduce the time-to-market for its compliance analytics solutions. By integrating all the required capture modalities into one request, instead of customizing and maintaining various APIs and formats, we can cover a wide range of use cases in a much shorter time.” - Tobias Fengler, Chief Engineering Officer Numonix: Numonix AI specializes in capturing, analyzing, and managing customer interactions across various communication channels, helping organizations enhance customer experiences and ensure regulatory compliance. They are leveraging Content Understanding to capture insights from recorded call data from both audio and video to transcribe, analyze, and summarize the contents of calls and meetings, allowing them to ensure compliance across all conversations. “Leveraging Azure AI Content Understanding across multiple modalities has allowed us to supercharge the value of the recorded data Numonix captures on behalf of our customers. Enabling smarter communication compliance and security in the financial industry to fully automating quality management in the world’s largest call centers.” – Evan Kahan, CTO & CPO Numonix IPV Curator: A leader in media asset management solutions, IPV is leveraging Content Understanding to improve their metadata extraction capabilities to produce stronger industry specific metadata, advanced action and event analysis, and align video segmentation to specific shots in videos. IPV’s clients are now able to accelerate their video production, reduce editing time, access their content more quickly and easily. To learn more about how Content Understanding empowers video scenarios as well as how our customers such as IPV are using the service to power their unique media applications, check out Transforming Video Content into Business Value. Robust Security and Compliance Built using Azure’s industry-leading enterprise security, data privacy, and Responsible AI guidelines, Azure AI Content Understanding ensures that your data is handled with the utmost care and compliance and generates responses that align with Microsoft’s principles for responsible use of AI. We are excited to see how Azure AI Content Understanding will empower organizations to unlock their data's full potential, driving efficiency and innovation across various industries. Stay tuned as we continue to develop and enhance this groundbreaking service. Getting Started If you are at Microsoft Ignite 2024 or are watching online, check out this breakout session on Content Understanding. Learn more about the new Azure AI Content Understanding service here. Build your own Content Understanding solution in the Azure AI Foundry. For all documentation on Content Understanding, please refer to this page.Enter new era of enterprise communication with Microsoft Translator Pro & document image translation
Microsoft Translator Pro: standalone, native mobile experience We are thrilled to unveil the gated public preview of Microsoft Translator Pro, our robust solution designed for enterprises seeking to dismantle language barriers in the workplace. Available on iOS, Microsoft Translator Pro offers a standalone, native experience, enabling speech-to-speech translated conversations among coworkers, users, or clients within your enterprise ecosystem. Watch how Microsoft Translator Pro transforms a hotel check-in experience by breaking down language barriers. In this video, a hotel receptionist speaks in English, and the app translates and plays the message aloud in Chinese for the traveler. The traveler responds in Chinese, and the app translates and plays the message aloud in English for the receptionist. Key features of the public preview Our enterprise version of the app is packed with features tailored to meet the stringent demands of enterprises: Core feature - speech-to-speech translation: Break language barriers: Real-time speech-to-speech translation allows you to have seamless communication with individuals speaking different languages. Unified experience: View or hear both transcription and translation simultaneously on a single device, ensuring smooth and efficient conversations. On-device translation: Harness the app's speech-to-speech translation capability without an internet connection in limited languages, ensuring your productivity remains unhampered. Full administrator control: Enterprise IT Administrators wield extensive control over the app's deployment and usage within your organization. They can fine-tune settings to manage conversation history, audit, and diagnostic logs, with the ability to disable history or configure automatic exportation of the history to cloud storage. Uncompromised privacy and security: Microsoft Translator Pro provides enterprises with a high level of translation quality and robust security. We know that Privacy and security are top priorities for you. Once granted access by your organization's admin, you can sign in the app with your organizational credentials. Your conversational data remains strictly yours, safeguarded within your Azure tenant. Neither Microsoft nor any external entities have access to your data. Join the Preview To embark on this journey with us, please complete the gating form . Upon meeting the criteria, we will grant your organization access to the paid version of the Microsoft Translator Pro app, which is now available in the US. Learn more and get started: Microsoft Translator Pro documentation. Document translation translates text embedded in images Our commitment to advancing cross-language communication takes a major step forward with a new enhancement in Azure AI Translator’s Document Translation (DT) feature. Previously, Document Translation supported fully digital documents and scanned PDFs. Starting January 2025, with this latest update, the service can also process mixed-content documents, translating both digital text and text embedded within images. Sample document translated from English to Spanish: (Frames in order: Source document, translated output document (image not translated), translated output document with image translation) How It Works To enable this feature, the Document Translation service now leverages Microsoft Azure AI Vision API to detect, extract, and translate text from images within documents. This capability is especially useful for scenarios where documents contain a mix of digital text and image-based text, ensuring complete translations without manual intervention. Getting Started To take advantage of this feature, customers can use the new optional parameter when setting up a translation request: Request A new parameter under "options" called "translateTextWithinImage" has been introduced. This parameter is of type Boolean, accepting "true" or "false." The default value is "false," so you’ll need to set it to "true" to activate the image text translation capability. Response: When this feature is enabled, the response will include additional details for transparency on image processing: totalImageScansSucceeded: The count of successfully translated image scans. totalImageScansFailed: The count of image scans that encountered processing issues. Usage and cost For this feature, customers will need to use the Azure AI Services resource, as this new feature leverages Azure AI Vision services along with Azure AI Translator. The OCR service incurs additional charges based on usage. Pricing details for the OCR service can be found here: Pricing details Learn more and get started (starting January 2025): Translator Documentation These new advancements reflect our dedication to pushing boundaries in Document Translation, empowering enterprises to connect and collaborate more effectively, regardless of language. Stay tuned for more innovations as we continue to expand the reach and capabilities of Microsoft Azure AI Translator.
