5 Azure AI Services to Build Market-Ready Applications

In the blog, we will discuss the five most useful services to develop market-ready and intelligent applications using AI (that to be in the shortest time.)

What are the Key Azure AI Services by Microsoft?

Microsoft has brought OpenAI into its cloud computing platform, Azure, to speed up the development of AI applications. It helps in creating APIs faster than before. Under its Azure AI services, it has included, tools, frameworks, customizable REST APIs, and client libraries SDKs in programming languages that are widely used by the developers.

So, if you are developing an AI application use these popular services for faster and easy development.

1. Anomaly Detector

Detecting real-time anomalies in the time series data is easy even if you have little knowledge of machine learning. It helps in anomaly detection either in batch mode or streaming mode.

The former is good for detecting anomalies in a given time range whereas streaming mode is good for an application that runs in real-time. What type of anomalies it can detect? From spikes and dips to changes in trend, everything is detectable under this service.

To detect specific types of anomalies, you can even customize and train the API models according to the applications’ needs. It consists of REST APIs and runs in containers. Azure AI can also be used with Power BI, Azure Synapse, and Azure Data Explorer as well.

2. Azure AI Vision

AI-powered applications for image and video processing using image recognition technology are easy to develop using Azure AI vision. It provides algorithms to process information from images in different formats such as JPEF, PNG, BMP, or GIF.  The information is used for text analysis, sentiment analysis, or reading aloud text from the videos or images.

3. Azure AI Speech

Microsoft’s Azure AI platform also offers services to develop web and mobile applications for translating speech to text or vice versa. The speech recognition technology allows developers to even develop custom voice assistants. It has customized voices and models to add different customization levels to the applications.

Here are a few capabilities of this service:

• Convert speech to text in both real-time and batch mode
• Translate speech-to-speech as well as speech-to-text
• Identify language from audio
• Recognize speakers from audio through unique voice characteristics
• Assess pronunciation and provide accuracy and fluency feedback
• Recognize the intent of the speech and voice commands

This speech service is available at flexible pricing.

4. Azure Bot Service

AI chatbots are used in almost every industry, from e-commerce to manufacturing. These smart bots can interact in natural language and conversational manner. To make a bot capable of mimicking human language and understanding their intent, Azure bot service is the best.

It offers tools to develop and manage chatbots that can communicate at any channel, from web to mobile app. It even allows the integration of popular collaboration tools such as MS Teams. If you are unsure how to develop a chatbot, read this full chatbot development guide.

5. Azure AI Document Intelligence

Document scanning is another popular AI application in various industries. Object Character Recognition (OCR )and machine learning technology are used to extract valuable information from the document and convert it into useful insights.

Azure AI document intelligence offers pre-built and custom models to develop such applications. You can customize the model to extract information from documents stored on-premises or in the cloud.

Other Popular Azure AI Services

Apart from these, Microsoft also offers 14 more services.

• Azure AI Search
• Azure OpenAI
• Content Moderator (Retired)
• Custom Vision
• Content Safety
• Face
• Immersive Reader
• Language
• Language Understanding (Retired)
• Metrics Advisor
• Personalizer (Retired)
• QnA Maker (Retired)
• Translator
• Video Indexer

These services are used to develop a wide variety of AI applications that work on NLP, machine learning, and computer vision technology. However, a few of these services are about to retire including the Anomaly detector service on October 1, 2026. So, purchase accordingly.

Pricing of Microsoft Azure AI Service 

Microsoft offers a range of AI services, including Azure Machine Learning, Azure Cognitive Services, and Azure Bot Services. These services empower businesses to build AI solutions for various applications like image recognition, natural language processing, and chatbots.

You can either choose the Pay-As-You-Go model or opt for Provisioned Throughput Units. One allows you to optimize the cost by using resources you need whereas later is good for scalable AI solutions. 

Azure OpenAI pricing also depends on the type of model you use. It has price variations as per language models, legacy language models, speech, base model, fine-tuning, and so on.

However, the pricing also varies with the type of Azure AI service you pick. For accurate price estimation, visit Microsoft’s official website.

Conclusion

Every business wants to quickly launch their AI solutions but it's easier said than done. A simple solution takes around one to three months whereas complex ones need more than a year. Microsoft Azure AI service cuts this time, empowering businesses to bring digital transformation and innovation rapidly.