Azure AI Language

What is Azure AI Language?

Azure AI Language, now branded Azure Language, is a Microsoft natural language processing service for understanding, analyzing and generating human language. It offers prebuilt and customizable models.

Key capabilities of Azure AI Language

• Personal data protection: Detects and redacts personal data.
• Named entity recognition: Predefined or custom entity types.
• Content summarization: Summarizes documents and meetings with topic segmentation.
• Conversational language understanding: Identifies intent and extracts information for routing.
• Custom question answering: Answers from your content.
• Health data analysis: Turns clinical text into insights.

How Azure AI Language works

Applications send text to the Azure Language API and receive structured results such as entities, summaries or intents. Custom models can be trained, and billing follows text records, training hours and model hosting. Containers allow running models on-premises or at the edge.

Who uses Azure AI Language?

Azure Language is used by developers building text analytics, chatbots, redaction and clinical text pipelines on Azure.

Azure AI Language pricing

Azure Language is pay-as-you-go, based on text records consumed for inference, training hours for custom models and model hosting. Dollar rates are on the Azure pricing page and were not stated in the page reviewed.

Azure AI Language alternatives

Alternatives include Amazon Comprehend, which offers pay-per-use NLP APIs, Google Cloud Natural Language, which offers entity and sentiment analysis, and spaCy, which is an open source NLP library.