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3 Microsoft Azure AI product features that accelerate language learning

The Microsoft Azure Cognitive Speech Services platform is a comprehensive collection of technologies and services aimed at accelerating the incorporation of speech into applications and amplifying differentiation to the market as a result. Among the services available are Speech to Text, Text to Speech, custom neural voice (CNV) Conversation Transcription Service, Speaker Recognition, Speech Translation, Speech SDK, and Speech Device Development Kit (DDK).

AI for education is an emerging technology that has the potential to revolutionize the way we teach and learn languages. One of the most important aspects of language learning is the ability to pronounce words accurately, and this is where Azure Cognitive Speech Service's new Pronunciation Assessment feature comes in. Another key opportunity is the development of synthetic bilingual voices for language learning experiences with Custom Neural Voice, in addition to our speech-to-text capabilities.

1. Pronunciation Assessment

The new feature is designed to provide instant feedback to users on the accuracy, fluency, and prosody of their speech when learning a new language. The service utilizes Azure Neural Text-to-Speech and Transformer models, along with ordinal regression and a hierarchical structure, to improve the accuracy of word-level assessment. The service is currently available in more than 10 languages, including American English, British English, Australian English, French, Spanish, and Chinese, with additional languages in preview.

The Pronunciation Assessment feature offers several benefits for educators, service providers, and students:

For educators, it provides instant feedback, eliminates the need for time-consuming oral language assessments, and offers consistent and comprehensive assessments.
For service providers, it offers high real-time capabilities, worldwide speech cognitive service, and supports growing global business.
For students and learners, it provides a convenient way to practice and receive feedback, authoritative scoring to compare with native pronunciation, and helps to follow the exact text order for long sentences or full documents.

Pronunciation Assessment is a powerful tool for language learning and teaching. By leveraging AI technologies such as TTS, Transformer, and Ordinal Regression, it provides instant and accurate feedback on speech pronunciation. With its wide range of supported languages and its ability to work with low-resource locales, it offers language learners of all backgrounds the opportunity to improve their language skills. With Pronunciation Assessment, educators can offer a more engaging and accessible learning experience, service providers can improve education customers' productivity, and students can practice more conveniently anywhere and anytime.

At the Microsoft Reimagine Education event on February 9, 2023, we announced several new features to support student success. Speech Pronunciation assessment is used in Reading Coach on Immersive Reader and the Speaker Progress in Microsoft Teams. It can be used inside and outside of the classroom to save teachers time and improve learning outcomes for students on reading fluency, accessible to all learners.

2. Speech-to-Text

Teachers and language learners naturally will mix native language and learning language during the learning conversation. Azure Speech to text supports real-time language identification for multilingual language learning scenarios, and helps human-human interaction with better understanding and readable context.

The latest multilingual modeling technology and transfer learning techniques were used to develop new speech-to-text (STT) languages based on vast amounts of data. These models have been trained in acoustics and language knowledge across different languages, and can handle both dictation and conversation in a variety of language domains. The output includes Inverse Text Normalization (ITN), capitalization (when appropriate), and automatic punctuation to enhance readability. Developers can easily integrate these languages into their projects using either a real-time streaming application programming interface (API) or batch transcription. The benefits of using a unified model across all languages will be immediately apparent.

3. Prebuilt and Custom Neural Voice (CNV)

Neural voice (Text-to-Speech) can read out learning materials natively and empower self-served learning anytime anywhere. Microsoft Azure AI provides more than 449 prebuilt neural voices across 147 languages and variances to enable users for AI teacher, content read-aloud capabilities, and more.

Custom Neural Voice (CNV) is a feature offered by Azure AI that enables users to create a unique, customized, synthetic voice for their applications. This feature uses human speech samples as training data to generate a highly natural-sounding voice for a brand or characters. Education companies are using this technology to personalize language learning, by creating unique characters with distinct voices that match the culture and background of their target audience. For example, Duolingo used Custom Neural Voice to help bring nine new characters to life within the language learning platform, and Pearson used it to improve pronunciation assessment. CNV is based on neural text-to-speech technology and allows users to create synthetic voices that are rich in speaking styles, cross languages, and adaptable. The realistic and natural-sounding voice is great for representing brands and personifying machines for conversational interactions with users.

Customer Inspiration

As technology continues to advance, it's becoming increasingly clear that the future of education lies in the integration of AI. Azure AI is at the forefront of this revolution, providing education companies with powerful tools to improve the learning experience and drive student engagement and achievement. We are inspired by five customers in the education space:

Pearson: The company wanted to use AI to deliver better services to students and empower teachers with highly accurate assessments, using Azure to develop AI-based services for language learners. They adopted new Microsoft algorithms and a leading-edge pronunciation assessment feature, which is a part of the Speech to Text capability.
Beijing Hongdandan Visually Impaired Service Center: The organization is working with Microsoft and a team of volunteers to generate AI audio content, which will be used to improve resources for people who are blind or have low vision. They used Azure Custom Neural Voice, a text-to-speech tool that allows users to create custom voice fonts, to generate the audio content.
Duolingo: The language learning company is using Custom Neural Voice to personalize language learning by introducing a cast of characters within the platform. Duolingo went through hundreds of iterations of characters, aimed for them to reflect the user base of cultures around the world while aligning visually with the app's longstanding main character. They used Custom Neural Voice to bring the characters to life within the language learning platform. They also used Azure to help bring nine new characters to life within the language learning platform.
HelloTalk: The innovative mobile app provides an enjoyable and effortless way to learn a new language by connecting users with native speakers from around the world. With its intuitive language tools, including its Pronunciation Assessment feature, and community features, it enables users to practice and immerse themselves in the culture of their target language, improve their pronunciation, and make new friends in the process.
Berlitz: The global leadership and language training company provides language learning products that use Azure speech recognition and pronunciation assessment. Through these innovate tools learners instantly receive detailed feedback on the accuracy and fluency of their speech in the new language. This allows Berlitz learners the flexibility to practice and perfect their pronunciation anywhere, anytime before speaking with native speakers in English, German, Spanish, and more.

The future impact of AI in education

The integration of AI, specifically speech services, into the education sector is becoming increasingly important as it can greatly enhance the learning experience and improve the effectiveness of teaching. Speech services such as Azure Pronunciation Assessment and Custom Neural Voice provide personalization, automation, and analytics in education platforms, which can lead to better student engagement and achievement. These services also enable educators to provide instant feedback on speech accuracy, fluency, and completeness which helps language learners to improve their pronunciation and fluency. With the ability to assess pronunciation in real-time, AI-powered speech services can help make the language assessment more engaging and accessible to learners of all backgrounds. Additionally, these services can also help with personalization of the learning experience for each student by providing personalized feedback and recommendations based on individual student needs. The integration of AI into the education sector can help educators empower students, and help students achieve their full potential.

Get started with Azure Cognitive Services 

Check out these features in Speech Studio using a no-code approach. Speech Studio is a set of UI-based tools for building AI services into your applications.

How to use pronunciation assessment
Speech-to-text overview
Text-to-speech overview
Custom Neural Voice overview

Quelle: Azure

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Three new Specializations help partners digitally transform customers

Two of our most enduring commitments to partners include our mission to provide you with the support, tools, and resources you need to grow and drive customer delivery excellence, and to ensure Google Cloud partners stand apart as deeply skilled technology pace setters. This includes working with partners to stay ahead of important new trends that have the potential to disrupt our shared customers—and that also have the potential to accelerate your business growth.To help do this, we’ve rolled out three new Specializations that are aligned to three very important new trends.Partners who earn our new Data Center Modernization Services Specialization have demonstrated success with data center transformation of workloads from on-premises, private cloud, or other public clouds.Partners who earn our new DevOps Services Specialization have demonstrated success implementing, managing, and improving the quality and speed of creating new applications on Google Cloud.Finally, partners who earn our new Contact Center AI Services Specialization have demonstrated success in implementing and migrating Contact Center AI projects with Dialogflow. I am also very proud to announce that we have several partners who have already earned these Specializations. I’d like to briefly talk about why each area is important, who the launch partners are, and provide you with information to learn more about each one.Data Center ModernizationGoogle worked with IDC on multiple studies involving global organizations across industries. This research projects that by 2026, the world will create 7 petabytes of data each second*—that’s equal to about 500 billion full pages of text every second. At some point all of this data will run through, or reside in, a data center—putting enormous pressure on customer infrastructures.Google’s perspective is to construct a unified data cloud “that supports every stage of the data lifecycle” in which “databases, data warehouses, data lakes, streaming, BI, AI, and ML all reside on a common infrastructure that is pre-configured to work together seamlessly.”Regardless of the approach, customers can rely on these partners who have earned our new  Data Center Modernization Services Specialization to lead the way to the modernized data center: Proquire, HCL Technologies, SADA Systems, Wipro, and Deloitte Consulting.DevOps ServicesWe live in an era in which customer demand for software solutions is rising so fast that quality and delivery times are becoming critical points of failure. Our DevOps Services Specialization positions our partners to meet this challenge head on and deliver sophisticated, reliable, secure software, fast—and manage it as a service, if required.In fact, DevOps is so important that it is regarded as a critical ingredient in driving customer satisfaction. According to the newly released 2023 Testing in DevOps report, nearly 90% of coding teams with “highly automated pipelines and mature DevOps practices” report high customer satisfaction rates.Congratulations to partners 66degrees, and DoiT for being the first two companies to achieve this critically important Specialization.Call Center AICall Center support is a significant area of focus for organizations across the globe for one major reason: Business reputations can be made or broken more by the quality of their support systems, than the quality of a product or service. This is why digitally transforming the call center has become a priority for business leaders.Dialogflow is the foundation of Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI Specialization. This platform understands natural languages, making it easy to design and integrate a conversational user interface into apps, web applications, devices, bots, interactive voice response systems, and more. In sum, it enables partners to transform the contact center by making it available to anyone, anywhere, on any device using a variety of different communication modes. All quickly, and accurately.Dialogflow can analyze multiple types of input from your customers, including text or audio inputs (like from a phone or voice recording). It can also respond to customers in a couple of ways, either through text or with synthetic speech.Customers looking to transform their contact center experience can work with our first group of partners to earn this Specialization: Solstice Consulting (DBA Kin + Carta U.S.), Teksystems Global Services, IBM, Quantiphi, and yosh.ai (Shopai Spółka Z Ograniczoną Odpowiedzialnością in Poland).If you’re a customer looking for a partner with a particular Specialization, we invite you to search through our Partner Directory.If you’re a partner who wants to learn more about how to earn Specializations, check out everything you need to know—including certification requirements, Customer Success Stories, and more—on the Partner Advantage portal. Partners can also schedule an optional pre-assessment with ISSI (for a fee) before applying for a Specialization by emailing googlespecadmin@issi-inc.com.*IDC, 2023 Data and AI Trends Report, February 2023.
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

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Farming from space: How orbital data is unlocking novel agriculture insights

High-performance computing (HPC) and orbital data deliver unprecedented insights into weather patterns, improving planning, forecasting, and decision-making, in an ever-evolving agriculture supply chain.

Consequently, global food security may be one of the defining challenges of the coming decades. By 2050, The World Bank estimates that global food production will have to rise by a staggering 70 percent to feed the growing global population.

Although population growth in several Western countries is slowing down or declining, many emerging markets are experiencing exponential growth in their populations.

By the turn of the century, it is expected that many of the most populated cities in the world will be located across Africa—with Lagos, Nigeria leading the pack with an estimated population of 88.3 million by 2100. The African continent will also play a leading role in global food security, with 60 percent of the world's uncultivated arable land situated in Africa.

Agriculture is also a major job creator in emerging economies such as in Africa. An estimated 80 percent of farmland in Africa and Asia is managed by smallholder farmers, who in turn produce up to 80 percent of the food supply in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. It is also not only agriculture that will generate and drive employment in Africa over the next decades, but also the respective businesses that support the agriculture industry, such as processing, packaging, logistics, financial services, and security, that will be able to add to the growing number of jobs in the sector, especially in rural areas.

Many smallholder farmers operate without the benefit of accurate weather data, which can undermine crop yields, lead to crop losses, and negatively impact regional and global food security. Innovation by Microsoft and industry partners powered by Azure HPC is set to change this, at scale.

The Agri-industry adapts to climate change

A newly established collaboration between Microsoft and Tomorrow.io, a global leader in weather and climate security, will support businesses, governments, and farmers across Africa in adapting to the growing impact of climate change.

Announced at the recently concluded COP27, the collaboration will provide near real-time data from a global multi-sensor satellite constellation with an AI-powered, high-resolution global weather model that will be deployed to Azure HPC.

This follows calls from United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres, who noted that high-quality weather forecasts, early warning systems, and climate information are "essential to improve protection and build resilience." Secretary-General Guterres further added that the UN has set an ambitious target of deploying a global, extreme weather, and climate change alert system within five years.

More than five billion people lack access to reliable and actionable weather information, the bulk of which reside in Africa and Asia. Improving smallholder farmers' access to accurate weather data can reduce the risks of reduced yields and diminishing crop viability. In addition, it can also improve access to crop insurance, a vital step in agricultural industry development.

Tomorrow.io and Microsoft’s collaboration will enable access to localized, high-resolution weather forecasting models, and will focus primarily on supporting climate-resilient farming and helping smallholder farmers optimize their yield productivity.

Not only will this collaboration with African government agencies empower existing meteorological agencies to deliver weather intelligence, early warnings for severe weather, and state-of-the-art climate information, but it will also increase local farmers’ ability to become more resilient in the face of extreme weather events, thus increasing the protection of the food production chain across the continent.

Powering weather research and forecasting to scale

Applying HPC capabilities to weather prediction can also aid responses to major storms which may help prevent catastrophic agricultural losses, as one ground-breaking project shows.

When the Category 5 storm Hurricane Maria struck the Caribbean in 2017, the National Centre for Atmospheric Research leveraged the power of Azure HPC to develop a one-kilometer resolution model of the storm with 371 million grid points. Powered by Azure HBv2 VMs featuring AMD's EPYCTM 7002 series processors, the researchers were able to scale the model to over 80,000 processes while maintaining 70 percent efficiency—more than double the performance of a supercomputer that ranks among the top 20 globally.

The Azure HBv2 VMs offer supercomputer performance and MPI scalability while still driving cost efficiencies for a variety of real-world HPC workloads. Each Azure HBv2 VM sports 120 AMD EPYCTM CPU cores and 480GB of memory that power applications in computational fluid dynamics, explicit finite element analysis, seismic processing, reservoir modeling, and weather simulation.

This reduces time to forecast by rapidly delivering actionable weather predictions, improving agility, and providing high-fidelity simulations of atmospheric conditions through physics and data assimilation.

For governments, businesses, and smallholder farmers that seek to safeguard the global food supply, access to accurate weather data powered by Azure HPC and AMD could be a game-changer. Uncertainty would become obsolete. Risks due to severe weather could be more optimally mitigated. And losses could be better protected. This is evident from a recent survey of farmers in the southern districts of India, where more than 70 percent of them misjudged the onset of the monsoon season and had to replant their crops.

With improved access to data, farmers and decision-makers can improve their response to weather events and ensure maximum crop yields, thereby building greater resilience and ensuring maximum crop yields.

Find out more about Azure HPC

To request a demo, contact HPCdemo@microsoft.com.
Learn more about Azure HPC + AI.
High-performance computing documentation.

Quelle: Azure

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Microsoft and Rockwell Automation collaborate on digital solutions for manufacturers

This post has been co-authored by Andrew Ellis, Vice President of Global Portfolio Engineering (Rockwell Automation) 

Industrial leaders have worked for years to improve the efficiency of manufacturing processes through digital innovation. But finding a balance between informational technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) requirements in their facilities has been a challenge. Solutions designed to solve immediate operational problems come up short on scalability, security, and manageability. Conversely, solutions prioritizing scale and security do not always solve urgent operational problems and can be too complex or costly to justify.

Microsoft and Rockwell Automation believe well-designed digital solutions can address operational, system, workforce, and scale needs at the same time. That’s why we have partnered to build digital solutions that deliver transformational outcomes with immediate value and long-term scale, resilience, and agility. By working together, we can leverage our respective strengths and expertise to develop solutions that meet the needs of manufacturers.

Building solutions for both physical and digital operations

While collaborating with our customers to design, build, operate, and maintain digital solutions, we've discovered a series of digital accelerators that, when applied correctly, make a critical difference in a solution’s success. These accelerators can bridge the gap between immediate business needs on the factory floor and enterprise-scale requirements by:

Taking advantage of cloud-to-edge frameworks: Using the same programming models, tools, application program interfaces (APIs), and management systems for cloud and operational systems helps make sure that edge computing systems are interoperable with existing IT systems and infrastructure. This makes it easier to integrate an OT computing system into an organization's existing workflow and processes.

Digital native best practices, including Microsoft Azure-to-edge development methods, help you to consistently build and operate modern cloud-based applications from the factory floor to the enterprise. These tools bring more consistency and flexibility into operations and can directly integrate with cloud services. They also allow your applications and dependencies to be packaged into lightweight containers, making them easily deployable on cloud and edge infrastructures.

Cloud-to-edge native management tools unify processes and data management across a company’s cloud, on-site, and edge systems. This can simplify daily operations and make data more visible and actionable while improving system resilience and security.
Leveraging cloud scalability for operational agility: Inherent cloud scalability is an accelerator for digital operations because it allows you to consistently deliver modern operational services to any geography and at any service level.

With cloud service flexibility, adding new functionalities does not impact the performance of existing applications, and expanding the delivery of capabilities across regions is frictionless and independent of scale.

Additionally, the cloud offers AI model development and training, as well as other services that were previously only available with on-premises computing. It can support model training and deployment to the edge and dramatically reduce data-transfer requirements. Once trained in the cloud, AI models can be deployed on the edge, where low latency and speed are critical in modern manufacturing processes.
Integrating IT and OT systems and data: IT and OT systems integration is an accelerator for digital operations because it allows you to feed modern applications with critical data needed to build effective digital feedback loops for operations.

An effective, well-designed digital feedback loop needs to enable data visibility and utilization across IT and OT systems to deliver better productivity and more uptime. Integrating data from both can help organizations to make more informed decisions by combining data from different sources, such as customer data from IT systems and production data from OT systems. It also helps organizations to improve productivity and uptime by enabling real-time monitoring and control of industrial processes. Rockwell Automation creates technology—from sensors to input and output control systems and operations software—that is vital in managing OT data at the edge and, with help from Microsoft platforms, integrating it with IT data.

When building solutions that integrate OT and IT data, it’s critical to include data and system security with Zero Trust as a key design principle. Access to operational systems, from networks to controllers, is typically granted based on implied trust. But this excess trust can be used by threat actors to breach networks. A Zero Trust approach improves cybersecurity by assuming no implicit trust and strengthening perimeters around business-critical assets. This includes securing OT data in transit and at rest, which ensures data confidentiality and integrity and certifies user identity.

How manufacturers are working with Microsoft and Rockwell Automation

Microsoft and Rockwell Automation are jointly delivering edge-to-cloud products that help you manage and make sense of the data in your factory. The result is actionable insights that can improve your business operations.

FactoryTalk InnovationSuite, powered by PTC, is a comprehensive set of tools that includes edge-to-enterprise analytics, machine learning, industrial internet of things (IIoT), and augmented reality. It is designed using the cloud-to-edge principle for building digital operations solutions, leverages cloud-native methods, takes advantage of IT and OT data integration, and is infinitely scalable when deployed on the Microsoft Azure cloud.
FactoryTalk Hub is a cloud-native approach to digital manufacturing operations, featuring tools under Design Hub, Operations Hub, and Maintenance Hub. Each hub consists of multiple solutions, born in the cloud and scalable for quick-time-to-value for manufacturers, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), and system integrators.

These solutions are helping Fonterra, a New Zealand-based dairy products co-operative owned by 9,000 farmers and families that are responsible for approximately 30 percent of the world’s dairy exports. Across 10 plants, Rockwell Automation-based solutions are capturing overall equipment and site-level efficiency data, which is then analyzed, summarized, and displayed locally. The data also is delivered to Microsoft Azure-based systems, which turn the data into insightful production reports that can be securely accessed across the company.

Learn more about our solutions

Rockwell Automation and Microsoft Azure are jointly helping other manufacturers to bridge the gap between IT and OT and create more efficient, resilient, and sustainable operations. Read more about what FactoryTalk InnovationSuite, powered by PTC and FactoryTalk Hub can do for your industrial business.
Quelle: Azure