Microsoft Azure Government Now Has Facial And Voice Recognition Features

The Redmond-based tech giant has just announced that its Microsoft Azure Government now includes cognitive services. The announcement was made earlier this week at the Tech Summit as a way to seize a big part of the growing market of government cloud computing services.

Microsoft Azure Government now includes facial and voice recognition features. In order to boost the capabilities of its cloud computing service for State and Federal Agencies in the United States, the Redmond-based American tech firm added HDInsight and PowerBI data tools to its Azure Government Cloud.

The company also included the new Cognitive Services that include facial and voice recognition which will only be available to first-party government entities. The company's cloud computing service is in competition with other government cloud computing services such as Google's Cloud Platform and the Amazon Web Services.

Of the additions made, the Microsoft Azure general manager Tom Keane said, "We have enabled scenarios such as audio and text translation into other languages as well as facial (gender and age) and emotion recognition with Computer Vision and Emotion." With the new Cognitive Services, developers will now be able to create apps that are a whole lot better and much faster. The Cognitive Services include a series of machine-based language, search, vision, and knowledge of API which will assist developers.

The PowerBI tool is expected to bring a positive change in how data is reported and analyzed. The data will be delivered directly to one single dashboard that is capable of showing live data and will allow users to maintain a connection to their data. Tools for analyzing, report authoring, visualizations, and canvassing are now more interactive, aesthetically pleasing, and a lot more easier to understand.

HDInsight, on the other hand, is designed to handle large amounts of data. It is a fully managed cloud Hadoop that offers assistance in streaming and processing large amounts of data in real-time by using Spark for HDInsight, Storm, and Kafka. Microsoft Azure Government will greatly help in developing intelligent applications and providing personalized experiences.