Azure Updates: AI capabilities; Load Balancer Insights; Smart buildings; Virtual Desktop

Throughout the past week, the Microsoft Azure team highlighted new AI capabilities, enhanced developer tools, smart building options and more.

CVP Eric Boyd profiled a variety of new AI capabilities in a blog post, discussing ways to build AI apps off of Cognitive Services. With the ongoing pandemic, Microsoft has partnered on the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset, which Text Analytics for health is intended to help parse. Customers like Sogeti are using Form Recognizer to pull data out of millions of documents, with speech capabilities finding use from other organizations like the BBC, which has created an AI-enabled voice assistant, dubbed Beeb.

Among general updates, private endpoints are GA for File Sync, Kubernetes Service supports confidential workloads with DCSv2 SKUs, .NET Core for Analysis Services client libraries is in preview. Several different AI capabilities received tweaks. Form Recognizer is GA, Text Analytics for unstructured health data is in-preview, and Neural Text to Speech is expanding to 15 new languages.

For developers, the Azure team issued a few different updates around software, VMs and tooling. Custom Commands are available to provide unified authoring. ...