Get started with Azure AI Content Understanding [Video]

Microsoft’s new generative AI-powered, multimodal, content analysis service is a next-generation version of its existing Cognitive Services platform.

Credit: shutterstock/Ole.CNX

Modern AI is about a lot more than chatbots, as shown by Microsoft’s Ignite 2024 pivot to using its stable of large and small language models to power autonomous agents. Much of its focus was on using productivity tools and software-generated events to trigger AI-orchestrated workflows, but the company touched on the importance of multimodal inputs as a way of extending modern AIs beyond keyboard and voice inputs, out into the wider world.

It wasn’t a surprising move. Microsoft’s original in-house Azure Cognitive Services was built around a series of models that focused on both computer vision and audio processing. It even used them as the basis of its Azure Percept industrial AI sensor hardware and to deliver AI-ready camera hardware for developers.

Understand the world with AI

Much of Cognitive Services is intended to provide AI-powered understanding …