What it does
Foundry Tools is the new name for the collection previously known as Azure AI Services or Azure Cognitive Services. It is a set of ready-made, fully managed AI capabilities that developers add to apps and agents through APIs, SDKs and studios, as part of the Microsoft Foundry platform. The page lists six services. Content Understanding converts documents, images and video that have no fixed format into structured data. Translator handles text and documents across more than 100 languages. Speech covers speech-to-text, text-to-speech and speech translation for voice agents. Vision reads text with OCR, analyzes images and detects faces. Language supports conversational interfaces, document summarization and text analysis. Document Intelligence extracts text, key-value pairs, tables and structure from documents. The page positions these tools next to foundation models from several vendors (it names Microsoft, OpenAI, Meta and Cohere) and guardrails for responsible AI. It says each service has its own consumption-based pricing, and that an Azure account is either pay as you go or a free trial of up to 30 days.
Capabilities
- Vision: OCR, image analysis and face detection
- Speech: speech-to-text, text-to-speech and speech translation
- Translator for text and documents in more than 100 languages
- Language: summarization, text analysis and conversational features
- Document Intelligence and Content Understanding for pulling structure out of documents, images and video
When to use it
- You need prebuilt OCR, speech or translation APIs inside an app or agent without training your own models
- You want to extract tables and key-value pairs from documents
- Your team already builds on Azure or Microsoft Foundry and wants managed AI services on the same platform
