What is the role of Azure AI Language in relation to speech?

Azure AI Language primarily focuses on understanding and processing natural language, which includes analyzing text derived from various sources. Its role encompasses a variety of functionalities that enhance comprehension of language in written form, facilitating tasks such as sentiment analysis, entity recognition, and summarization. Although the processing of spoken language is indirectly related—since spoken words can be converted to text through speech-to-text technologies—Azure AI Language itself is more concerned with the analytical aspects of text rather than the speech component directly.

The emphasis on analyzing text situates Azure AI Language within the broader spectrum of natural language processing capabilities, where understanding context, intent, and meaning are prioritized. While it can be part of a workflow that begins with speech recognition, its core function does not extend solely to processing audio or spoken language, but rather to interpreting and extracting insights from the text generated from such audio inputs.