Azure Cognitive Services is a platform that allows developers to tap into APIs and add them to apps leverage speech, search, and other AI tools. Importantly, developers can leverage the service without needing to learn master machine learning abilities. Looking at the new API, Microsoft announced a new Text Analytics for Health API. Now in preview, this will allow developers to take insights and relationships from medical data that is unstructured. Part of the already available Text Analytics API, the new tool will be used to help in Microsoft’s COVID-19 search engine. “With Text Analytics for health, users can detect words and phrases mentioned in unstructured text as entities that can be associated with semantic types in the healthcare and biomedical domain, such as diagnosis, medication name, symptom/sign, examinations, treatments, dosage, and route of administration.”
APIs Reach General Availability
Elsewhere, Microsoft’s Custom Commands and Form Recognizer APIs for Cognitive Services reached general availability. Custom Commands is baked into Azure Speech Cognitive Service. It gives dev’s the ability to create command-and-control voice apps. For example, applications that run on smart home devices such as thermostats. Microsoft says this API works with applications that have a defined set of variables. As for Form Recognizer, it gives developers tools to see data from documents without needing data-science knowledge. This means dev’s can easily process large volumes of digital information in document form. Lastly, Microsoft also revealed this week that 15 new voices are now supported in the Neural Text to Speech API.
