Azure Weekly

Issue #381 - 7th August 2022

Three very interesting updates this week; firstly Azure Neural TTS previews a new contextual voice model for long-form paragraph reading. I've been playing with this service for the last couple of years to see if we could use it to turn some of our thought leadership blog posts into podcasts, but I've never been happy with the results to the point where I'd publish them. I've re-run my experiments and the results have significantly improved. I was particularly impressed by the "Tony (Neural) Preview" voice, which you can test on the product landing page. It's not just the quality of the voice synthesis that's improving, but also the number of supported languages: Microsoft expands global language support for Speech-to-Text & Text-to-Speech. And an article that brings to life an idea that was deemed "impossible" 15 years ago when I worked in ecommerce: When AI meets fashion: Azure Video Indexers new model for detecting Featured Clothing in videos.

There's a lot of hype about no-code/low-code, but if you're creating processes that an organisation will depend upon for its BAU activities, you can't disregard standard engineering practices (testing / versioning / DevOps). There's an interesting post that highlights a recent feature: Testing Azure Logic Apps with Mock Data.