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Choose an Azure AI services technology

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Azure AI services offers a suite of data science tools, models, and inferencing capabilities that support a broad array of functionality. Most require little or no specific AI expertise to use. So whether you're a student, run a small-business, are launching a startup, or lead a large enterprise-scale project, you can get started right away. It's recommended to use these services, over building custom solutions, to embed intelligent application functionality into your workload. For many use cases, these prebuilt models and SaaS solutions are sufficient to provide what your workload requires. However, many of these capabilities support further customization and fine tuning as necessary, without the need to re-design your workload.

Some projects require functionality that goes beyond what prebuilt models can provide. You could need to use your own data exclusively to build a new model, or perform functions outside the scope of any existing prebuilt models. In those cases, Azure Machine Learning services let you build custom models of any type or scale. While these solutions require more expertise, they can also support bespoke requirements for organizations of every scale and for every budget.

This article provides a comparison and decision guide between the different offerings of Azure AI and Azure Machine Learning services. It's organized by broad categories to help you choose which service or model is right for your use case.

Categories of Azure AI services

Azure offers a number of AI services that can be grouped into categories based on their capabilities:

Technology selection guide Service descriptions
Targeted language processing Azure AI Language • Azure AI Translator • Azure AI Document Intelligence
Speech recognition and generation Azure AI Speech • Immersive Reader
Image and video processing guide Azure AI Vision • Azure AI Custom Vision • Azure AI Video Indexer • Azure AI Face • Azure OpenAI
Azure AI Content Safety Azure AI Content Safety is an AI service that detects harmful user-generated and AI-generated content in applications and processes images and text to flag content that's potentially offensive or unwanted. It's able to automatically detect and scan content regardless of its source language.
Custom Machine Learning Azure Machine Learning service procures and exposes many proprietary and open-source models that you can use directly or customize further with more training. It also supports the creation of new models of any type trained using your own data.

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