Azure AI Content Understanding allows users to extract insights from documents, images, videos, and audio that can be used to build apps

Microsoft has announced a significant addition to its suite of Azure AI services: Azure AI Content Understanding, a new service designed to allow businesses to extract insights from documents, images, videos, and audio without hiring artificial intelligence engineers.

Azure AI Content Understanding is built from the ground up for generative AI, enabling organizations to build generative AI solutions with the latest models available without requiring specialized AI skills such as prompt engineering.

In a blog post, Microsoft says the service can be used in various industries to extract insights from diverse content types, and it is designed to address various customer pain points related to generative AI, including inconsistent output quality, ineffective pre-processing, and difficulties scaling out solutions.

For instance, Azure AI Content Understanding can help businesses by providing a unified service for ingesting and transforming data of different modalities, such as documents, images, videos, and audio, simultaneously and at scale. The service can also parse large files to extract values accurately using advanced AI techniques like intent clarification and a strongly typed schema.

The service can also trigger human review only when needed, minimizing the total cost of processing content. It can work with unstructured data, such as documents, images, videos, and audio. Additionally, the service ingests the data and then makes it structured and searchable, allowing companies to extract insights from multimodal data and develop automation workflows.

Azure AI Content Understanding can be used for various generative AI applications, including media asset management, insurance claims, highlight video reel generation, retrieval augmented generation (RAG), and post-call analytics for call center and meeting data.

The new platform is now in public preview, and several companies, including Philips, WPP, ASC, Numonix, and IPV, are already using the service.

In other news, Microsoft also released the new Azure AI Foundry, the unified experience that brings together all the tools software developers need.