Microsoft has announced Azure Cognitive Service for Vision, a new production-ready computer vision platform built from the company's Project Florence. Microsoft says the new product brings better vision services that will be integrated into Microsoft 365 apps such as Teams, Word, OneDrive, Outlook, PowerPoint, Designer, and more.
The platform is built from the Microsoft Research Project Florence initiative, which is a new computer vision technology that brings next-generation visual recognition capabilities.
Azure Cognitive Service for Vision – which is now available in preview – gives developers tools for integrating visual components into their apps. For example, the platform provides image analysis, facial detection, image tagging, text reading, text extraction with optical character recognition (OCR), and facial recognition (that Microsoft says is “responsible”).
Features
When Microsoft 365 subscribers use Azure Cognitive Service for Vision, they get the following features as standard:
- “Dense captions: Automatically deliver rich captions, design suggestions, accessible alt-text, SEO optimization, and intelligent photo curation to support digital content.
- Image retrieval: Improve search recommendations and advertisements with natural language queries that seamlessly measure the similarity between images and text.
- Background removal: Transform the look and feel of images by easily segmenting people and objects from their original background, replacing them with a preferred background scene.
- Model customization: Lower costs and time to deliver custom models that match unique business demands at high precision, and with just a handful of images.
- Video summarization (Video TL;DR): Search and interact with video content in the same intuitive way you think and write. Locate relevant content without the need for additional metadata.”
Microsoft says Reddit is already a partner of Azure Cognitive Service for Vision. The social media platform will use the service to add captions to all images on Reddit.
Tip of the day: With many reachable wireless access points popping up and disappearing again, the available networks list can become quite annoying. If needed you can use the allowed and blocked filter list of Windows to block certain WiFi networks or all unknown WiFi networks.
