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Natural Language Processing

Azure AI Language services for text and speech analysis

⏱️ Estimated reading time: 20 minutes

Text Analysis

Azure AI Language provides advanced services to analyze and understand text.

Language Detection:
- Identifies the predominant language in text
- Supports over 100 languages
- High accuracy even with mixed text

Sentiment Analysis:
- Classifies text as positive, negative, or neutral
- Provides confidence scores
- Analysis at document and sentence level

Key Phrase Extraction:
- Identifies important concepts in text
- Summarizes main content
- Useful for categorization and search

Entity Extraction:
- Identifies people, places, dates, organizations
- Automatically categorizes entities
- Links entities to knowledge bases

🎯 Key Points

  • βœ“ Language detection identifies the main language
  • βœ“ Sentiment analysis classifies positivity/negativity
  • βœ“ Key phrase extraction summarizes important content
  • βœ“ Entity extraction identifies people, places, dates
  • βœ“ Supports multiple languages and cultural contexts
  • βœ“ Provides confidence scores

Question Answering

The Question Answering service allows creating conversational knowledge bases.

How it works:
- Knowledge Base: Collection of predefined questions and answers
- Smart Matching: Finds the best answer using language understanding
- Continuous Learning: Improves over time based on interactions
- Integration: Connects with bots and applications

Features:
- Exact Answers: Provides precise answers to specific questions
- Follow-up Answers: Handles multi-turn conversations
- Confidence and Metadata: Includes confidence scores and source
- Personalization: Allows context-specific personalized responses

Use Cases:
- Automated customer support
- Virtual assistants
- Internal help systems
- Educational chatbots

🎯 Key Points

  • βœ“ Creates knowledge bases for automatic responses
  • βœ“ Finds answers using language understanding
  • βœ“ Improves with usage and feedback
  • βœ“ Handles multi-turn conversations
  • βœ“ Provides confidence scores
  • βœ“ Integrable with chatbots and applications

Conversational Language Understanding (CLU)

CLU is an AI service that enables applications to understand user intent in natural conversations.

Main Components:
- Intents: What the user wants to do (e.g., 'book flight', 'order food')
- Entities: Specific data extracted (e.g., dates, places, quantities)

How to train a CLU model:
1. Define intents: Create categories of user actions
2. Provide examples: Give example phrases for each intent
3. Label entities: Mark specific data in phrases
4. Train model: System learns patterns automatically
5. Test and improve: Evaluate performance and add more examples

Advanced Features:
- Multi-intent: Handles phrases with multiple intents
- Active Learning: Suggests new examples to label
- Integration: Works with Azure Bot Service and other services

🎯 Key Points

  • βœ“ Identifies user intents in conversations
  • βœ“ Extracts specific entities like dates and places
  • βœ“ Trained with labeled example phrases
  • βœ“ Supports multiple languages and domains
  • βœ“ Continuously improves with active learning
  • βœ“ Integrable with bot services and applications

Azure AI Speech

Azure AI Speech provides services to convert between speech and text, and generate synthetic speech.

Speech-to-Text:
- Real-time transcription from audio to text
- Supports multiple languages and accents
- High accuracy with advanced AI models
- Handling of noise and difficult acoustic conditions

Text-to-Speech:
- Generation of natural and realistic voice
- Multiple voices and languages available
- Adjustment of pitch, speed, and style
- Neural voice for greater naturalness

Additional Features:
- Voice Translation: Real-time translation between languages
- Speaker Recognition: Identification of people by voice
- Custom Voice Synthesis: Creation of unique voices
- Voice Analysis: Detection of emotions and characteristics

Applications:
- Virtual assistants and chatbots
- Automatic subtitles
- Accessibility for people with disabilities
- Medical dictation systems

🎯 Key Points

  • βœ“ Speech-to-Text converts audio to text in real-time
  • βœ“ Text-to-Speech generates natural and realistic voice
  • βœ“ Supports multiple languages and accents
  • βœ“ Handles difficult acoustic conditions
  • βœ“ Includes voice translation and speaker recognition
  • βœ“ Useful for accessibility and virtual assistants