Microsoft adds Hindi to its Text Analytics service

Microsoft has announced the addition of Hindi as the latest language under its Text Analytics service to further support businesses and organizations with customer Sentiment Analysis. Text Analytics is part of the Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services. Using this service, organizations can find out what people think of their brand or topic as this enables analyzing Hindi text for clues about positive, neutral, or negative sentiment. The Text Analytics service can be used for any textual / audio input or feedback in combination with Azure Speech-to-Text service. This new development enables Sentiment Analysis for the most spoken language in India and the fourth most spoken language in the world.

Sundar Srinivasan – General Manager – AI & Search – Microsoft India said, “Underlining our commitment to helping empower every business to achieve more, Microsoft has added Hindi to the already robust set of international languages supported by Text Analytics service. We are helping brands break language barriers and reach out to Hindi-speaking customers to understand the customer’s sentiment about their products, services, and broaden their user feedback reach. With this release, we are bringing in cutting edge cloud services, AI, and natural language processing to deepen the trust between brands and customers in India.”

Microsoft’s Text Analytics service is powered by Microsoft Azure and uses the latest AI models to analyze content in Hindi, using Natural Language Processing (NLP) for text mining and text analysis. The functionality provided by Text Analytics include sentiment analysis, opinion mining, key phrase extraction, language detection, named entity recognition, and PII detection. Sentiment analysis currently supports more than 20 languages including Hindi.

Microsoft Text Analytics service’s Sentiment Analysis feature evaluates text and returns confidence scores between 0 and 1 for positive, neutral, and negative sentiment for each document and sentences within a document. The service also provides sentiment labels (such as “negative”, “neutral” and “positive”) based on the highest confidence score at a sentence and document-level. It can be accessed from Azure cloud and on-prem using Containers. This helps brands in detecting positive and negative tonality in customer reviews, social media & call center conversations, and forum discussions, among other channels no matter where their data resides.

Chris Wendt, Program Manager, Azure Language services shared his thoughts on how Sentiment Analysis is the primary feature of Text Analytics, because it gives broad insight into the perception of your product and your organization, delivering a fast and actionable signal whether things are going well, or require corrective action.

The Sentiment Analysis feature provides more granular information about the opinions related to aspects (such as the attributes of products or services from a brand) in text. Businesses can extract insights from customer service calls by using Speech-to-Text, Sentiment Analysis, and Key Phrase Extraction in a single workflow. These results can be displayed in a Power BI dashboard or a portal to better understand their customers, highlight customer service trends, and drive customer engagement.

Hindi is the most recent addition to the number of languages supported by Microsoft Text Analytics API service. Other prominent languages supported include English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian (Bokmål), Danish, Finnish, Polish, Greek, Russian, Chinese (traditional), Chinese (simplified), Japanese, Korean, and Turkish.