Microsoft announces January developer updates for Azure Cognitive Services Speech Service

Microsoft opened the new year with an announcement for developers, adding a new Python API to Cognitive Services Speech Service. Python 3.5 and later versions are supported on both Windows and Linux and Python also becomes the first language that Speech Service supports for macOS X. Developers will be able to install Python modules from PyPI.

Using the npm package manager, developers will be able to install the Speech Service module, which supports Node.js and JavaScript in the browser, as well as expanding support to Ubuntu 18.04 (it previously supported Ubuntu 16.04). Microsoft adopted user requests, reducing the required number of concurrent threads, locks and mutexes to create a more lightweight SDK and adding a connection object, which can control when the SDK connects to Speech Service.