At its Build developer conference in Seattle this week, Microsoft is putting a lot of emphasis on its AI and machine learning services. For the most part, that means launching new services and bringing some existing services to new places. With the plethora of different AI services the company now offers, it’s maybe also no surprise that we’re now seeing some consolidation and so today, Microsoft announced that it is now bringing its four speech-related Cognitive Services AI tools under a single umbrella (and API).
The unified speech service will combine Microsoft speech recognition service, text-to-speech API, customized voice models and translation service. Currently, these are all available as separate services (the Bing Speech API, the Speaker Recognition API, the Custom Speech Service and the Translator Speech API), all with their own pricing models.
This update joins a number of other Cognitive Services announcements at Build, including the launch of the company’s new handwriting recognition service and support for the Custom Vision service in Azure IoT edge.
