Azure AI is driving innovation and improving experiences for employees, users, and customers in a variety of ways; from increasing workday productivity to promoting inclusion and accessibility. The success of Azure AI is built on a foundation of Microsoft Research, a wide range of Azure products that have been tested at scale within Microsoft apps, and Azure customers who use these services for the benefit of their end users.

Highlighted below are a few cases where Azure AI is utilized within Microsoft and beyond.

Speech transcription and captioning in Teams

Speech transcription and captioning in Microsoft Teams is powered by Azure Cognitive Services for Speech. The Speech-to-Text service transcribes over 54 million hours of meetings in real time and captions of 6.8 million characters each month. Microsoft achieved human parity in conversational speech recognition when it reached an error rate of 5.9 percent. The word error rate of professional speech transcribers is 5.9 percent.

Content and design production in PowerPoint

Content and design production in PowerPoint, which has been used by nearly two billion Designer slides since its launch in 2015. It is powered by Azure Cognitive Services and Azure Machine Learning. These tools build models faster and at scale, replacing local development, and recommend background images and videos. The 2022 launch of Azure OpenAI Service improves the capabilities of this feature. Up to 4.1 million slides are created with the Designer each day, and the Designer team regularly retrains models and experiments with model optimization to provide optimized content recommendations.

Biometric detection and identity verification in Windows Hello

Biometric detection and identity verification in Windows Hello, which has been deployed to over 100,000 Microsoft employees, is powered by Azure Cognitive Services for Vision. Outside of Microsoft, Uber uses the Cognitive Services Face API, which powers Windows Hello, to ensure that drivers using the app match the account on file for fraud prevention and to increase peace of mind for both drivers and riders. This extra verification step is fast, works on all smartphones, and can scale to over one million driver-partners.

Content reading and writing experiences in Edge and Microsoft 365

Content reading and writing experiences in Edge and Microsoft 365 are powered by Azure Cognitive Services for Speech and Applied AI Services. Immersive Reader, which is used by over 15 million users on applications such as Teams, Word, OneNote, and Outlook, allows users to read text with an optimized layout and helps them to read 10 percent faster with 50 percent fewer reading errors.

Contextual Assistance in Outlook

Contextual assistance in Outlook, powered by Azure Machine Learning, has increased customer engagement. Meeting Insights, which is shown in over 40 percent of opened meetings on supported Outlook clients, has customers reporting that two out of three suggestions are useful. The learnings from these Meeting Insights models are being used to integrate other intelligent content recommendation features, such as “Suggested Attachments” and “Suggested Reply with File,” into Outlook.

Conversational Intelligence in Viva Sales and Dynamics

Viva Sales and Dynamics use conversational intelligence powered by Azure Machine Learning and Cognitive Services for Speech & Language. Viva Sales helps sellers by providing real-time business context from their CRM system, facilitating knowledge sharing and collaboration, and offering AI-powered insights to improve customer engagements.

Editorial Assistance in Microsoft 365

Editorial assistance in Microsoft 365 powered by Azure Machine Learning, is available through Microsoft Editor, which gives writers intelligent tools to improve their writing in documents, emails, and posts across the web. The tools are available in Word, Outlook, and the Edge Browser, and are expanded to Outlook.com, Outlook for the web, and browser extensions for Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome in over 20 languages.

Discover more use cases, solutions, research, and customer inspiration with Azure AI.