Azure Neural Text-to-Speech updates: 51 new voices added to the portfolio

by Contributed | Dec 15, 2020 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

This post was co-authored with Qinying Liao, Sheng Zhao, Gang Wang, Yueying Liu

Neural Text to Speech (Neural TTS), a powerful speech synthesis capability of Cognitive Services on Azure, enables you to convert text to lifelike speech which is close to human-parity.  Since its launch, we have seen it widely adopted in a variety of scenarios by many Azure customers, from voice assistants to audio content creation. More and more customers are asking for richer and more diverse choices of synthetic voices for different use cases.

Today, we are excited to announce that Azure Neural TTS has added 51 new voices for a total of 129 neural voices across 54 languages/locales. With this release, we provide at least one male and one female voice for customers to choose in each language/locale.  In total, Azure TTS now enables developers to reach millions more people with more than 200 voices available in standard and neural TTS.

What’s new

Neural TTS has now been extended to support 51 new voices, which will bring to you the capability to have both male and female voices in each language for your apps. You can hear samples of the voices below, or try them with your own text in our demo.

46 new voices are generally available

In total 46 new voices are released across the 49 locales that are generally available in the Azure data centers/regions that support neural TTS (see the full list of Azure regions here).

5 new voices are in public preview

We have also added 5 male voices in the 5 low-resource languages that have been supported since November. These voices are available in public preview in three Azure regions: EastUS, SouthEastAsia and WestEurope.

Hear the samples below:

With this release, we now support a total of 129 neural voices across 54 languages/locales. In addition, over 70 standard voices are available in 49 languages/locales. Visit Language support – Speech service – Azure Cognitive Services | Microsoft Docs for the full language and voice list.

Continuous voice quality improvement

In general, Neural TTS can convert text to lifelike speech, however there are nuances that can always be improved. For example, we have customers who have requested the ability to support a scenario where Katja, our de-DE neural voice, can pronounce English words in the context of a German sentence. This was valuable feedback, and we anticipate a similar need across languages.

For German, we observed that our users prefer the voice to handle an English word/phrase as close as the native English pronunciation. To enable a voice model to speak English as a second language, it is normally required that we collect the speech data of the same speaker speaking English besides his/her native language. This is a big challenge as we do not have sufficient multi-language speech data from our German voice talents. By leveraging cross-lingual capability of UNI-TTS, we are able to generate more English pronunciation data with the transferred voice from our German voice talent. Such data is used to improve the quality of the English word/phrase pronunciations for the German Katja voice, so Katja can pronounce English words in a more natural way.

The CMOS metric is used to measure the improvement of the English word pronunciation for Katja. Below table shows that the updated model is significantly better in pronouncing English words in the context of a German sentence.

This improvement has now been released to the Azure Neural TTS service for Katja. Moving forward, we’ll extend this capability to support more languages.

Tell us your experience!

By offering more voices across more languages and locales, we anticipate developers across the world will be able to build applications that change experiences for millions. Whether you’re building a voice-enabled chatbot or IoT device, an IVR solution, adding read-aloud features to your app, converting e-books to audio books, or even adding Speech to a translation app, you can make all these experiences natural sounding and fun with Neural TTS.

Let us know how you are using or plan to use Neural TTS voices in this form. If you prefer, you can also contact us at mstts [at] microsoft.com. We look forward to hearing your experience and developing more compelling services together with you for the developers around the world.

Get started

Explore the available voices in this demo

Add voice to your app in 15 minutes

Build a voice-enabled bot

Deploy Azure TTS voices on prem with Speech Containers

Build your custom voice

How to use Logic App with Azure Active Directory Authorization Policies

by Contributed | Dec 15, 2020 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

In this article, I will demonstrate how to call a logic app with the Aouth2 approach

The problem that I going to solve is to provide a gatekeeper page that will not download files from the Storage account unless the user is authenticated.

I will utilize a static web site on the storage account to host small HTTP pages and javascripts

the web page will be responsible to obtain the Bearer token when the user Sign-in

then it will use this Token to pass it to the logic app  

Create website.

You can create the static by following the Host a static website in Azure Storage | Microsoft Docs

Create the Active Directory application

I have followed the article https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/develop/quickstart-v2-javascript

Register your application

1. Sign in to the Azure portal.


2. If you have access to multiple tenants, use the Directory + subscription filter 
   

    

   
    in the top menu to select the tenant in which you want to register an application.


3. Search for and select Azure Active Directory.


4. Under Manage, select App registrations > New registration.


5. Enter a Name for your application. Users of your app might see this name, and you can change it later.


6. Under Supported account types, select Accounts in any organizational directory and personal Microsoft accounts.


7. Select Register. On the app Overview page, note the Application (client) ID value for later use.


8. Under Platform Configurations, select Add a platform. A panel opens on the left. There, select the Web Applications region.


9. Still on the left, set the Redirect URI value to [the static website URL] Then, select Access Token and ID Token.


10. Select Configure.

1.2.2        Build the HTML page with msal.js

Create HTML with the below content

!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">

<head>
  <meta charset="UTF-8">
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, shrink-to-fit=no">
  <title>Demo for using Logic app using Azure Active Directory Authorization Policies </title>
  <link rel="SHORTCUT ICON" href="./favicon.svg" type="image/x-icon">

  <!-- msal.min.js can be used in the place of msal.js; included msal.js to make debug easy -->
  https://alcdn.msauth.net/lib/1.4.4/js/msal.js

  <!-- msal.js with a fallback to backup CDN -->
  <script type="text/javascript">
    if (typeof Msal === 'undefined') document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='https://alcdn.msftauth.net/lib/1.4.4/js/msal.js' type='text/javascript' %3E%3C/script%3E"));
  </script>

  <!-- adding Bootstrap 4 for UI components  -->
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://stackpath.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/4.4.1/css/bootstrap.min.css"
    integrity="sha384-Vkoo8x4CGsO3+Hhxv8T/Q5PaXtkKtu6ug5TOeNV6gBiFeWPGFN9MuhOf23Q9Ifjh" crossorigin="anonymous">
</head>

<body>
  <nav class="navbar navbar-expand-lg navbar-dark bg-primary">
    <a class="navbar-brand" href="/">Storage account Gate keeper using logic app </a>
    <div class="btn-group ml-auto dropleft">
      <button type="button" id="signIn" class="btn btn-secondary" onclick="signIn()">Sign In</button>
      <button type="button" id="signOut" class="btn btn-success d-none" onclick="signOut()">Sign Out</button>
    </div>
  </nav>
  <br>
  <h5 class="card-header text-center">this is a demo only site </h5>
  <br>
  <div class="row" style="margin:auto">
    <div id="card-div" class="col-md-3 d-none">
      <div class="card text-center">
        <div class="card-body">
          <h5 class="card-title" id="welcomeMessage">Please sign-in to see your profile and read your mails</h5>
          <div id="profile-div"></div>
          <br>
          <br>
          <button class="btn btn-primary" id="seeProfile" onclick="downloadFile()">Download File</button>
          <br>
        </div>
      </div>
    </div>
    <br>
    <br>
    <div class="col-md-4">
      <div class="list-group" id="list-tab" role="tablist">
      </div>
    </div>
    <div class="col-md-5">
      <div class="tab-content" id="nav-tabContent">
      </div>
    </div>
  </div>
  <br>
  <br>
  <!-- importing bootstrap.js and supporting js libraries -->
  https://code.jquery.com/jquery-3.4.1.slim.min.js
  https://stackpath.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/4.4.1/js/bootstrap.min.js
  <!-- importing app scripts (load order is important) -->
  http://./authConfig.js
  http://./ui.js
  http://./authPopup.js

</body>

</html>

Create file authPopup.js

// Create the main myMSALObj instance
// configuration parameters are located at authConfig.js
const myMSALObj = new Msal.UserAgentApplication(msalConfig);
var Bearer = ''
let searchParams = new URLSearchParams(window.location.search)
let fileParam = searchParams.get('file')
function signIn() {
  myMSALObj.loginPopup(loginRequest)
    .then(loginResponse => {
      console.log("id_token acquired at: " + new Date().toString());
      console.log(loginResponse);

      if (myMSALObj.getAccount()) {
        Bearer = loginResponse.idToken.rawIdToken;
        showWelcomeMessage(myMSALObj.getAccount());
      }
    }).catch(error => {
      console.log(error);
    });
}

function signOut() {
  myMSALObj.logout();
}

//endpoint, token, callback
function downloadFile() {

  const headers = new Headers();
  const bearer = `Bearer ${Bearer}`;

  headers.append("Authorization", bearer);
  headers.append("FileName", fileParam);

  const options = {
    method: "post",
    headers: headers
  };
  fetch(logicAppUrl, options)
    .then(resp => resp.blob())
    .then(blob => {
      const url = window.URL.createObjectURL(blob);
      const a = document.createElement('a');
      a.style.display = 'none';
      a.href = url;
      // the filename you want
      a.download = fileParam;
      document.body.appendChild(a);
      a.click();
      window.URL.revokeObjectURL(url);
      alert('your file has downloaded!'); // or you know, something with better UX...
    })
    .catch(error => console.log(error))
}

authConfig.js

 
// Config object to be passed to Msal on creation.
// For a full list of msal.js configuration parameters, 
// visit https://azuread.github.io/microsoft-authentication-library-for-js/docs/msal/modules/_authenticationparameters_.html
const msalConfig = {
  auth: {
    clientId: "7ebe8908-7acd-4e20-b1f4-24715b364cf0",
    authority: "https://login.microsoftonline.com/common",
    redirectUri: "https://largfile.z6.web.core.windows.net",
  },
  cache: {
    cacheLocation: "sessionStorage", // This configures where your cache will be stored
    storeAuthStateInCookie: false, // Set this to "true" if you are having issues on IE11 or Edge
  }
};  
  
// Add here the scopes to request when obtaining an access token for MS Graph API
// for more, visit https://github.com/AzureAD/microsoft-authentication-library-for-js/blob/dev/lib/msal-core/docs/scopes.md
const loginRequest = {
  scopes: ["openid", "profile", "User.Read"]
};

const logicAppUrl='https://prod-39.eastus.logic.azure.com:443/workflows/92083fac9d2c4805b153907db6976f86/triggers/manual/paths/invoke?api-version=2016-10-01'

Creating the logic app

The logic app will receive the request using HTTP and will pass the file name to the storage account action

1.3.1        Enable logic app Azure Active Directory Authorization Policies

Make the issuer https://login.microsoftonline.com/9188040d-6c67-4c5b-b112-36a304b66dad/v2.0  The GUID that indicates that the user is a consumer user from a Microsoft account is 9188040d-6c67-4c5b-b112-36a304b66dad for information at

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/develop/access-tokens

More information on Secure access and data – Azure Logic Apps | Microsoft Docs

the HTML and JavaScript attached 

Build hybrid and multicloud architectures with Azure hybrid solution architectures

by Contributed | Dec 15, 2020 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

This past September at Ignite 2020, we made a ton of new hybrid announcements. And not only did new products go into GA and Preview, we showed how customers have been using our hybrid solutions every day in their own on-premises, multi-cloud, and multi-edge environments.  

Organizations such as Africa’s Talking, Ferguson, Haivision, KPMG, RxR Realty, and Siemens Healthineers have been using Azure Arc and Azure Stack to bring Azure to any infrastructure and modernize on-premises datacenters. As more customers adopt these solutions, we are excited to share the new Hybrid and Multicloud Architectures section in Architecture Center – which is part of our Docs website – for how to bring these solutions to life.  

Azure Hybrid Cloud Architectures

Azure Arc 

Azure Arc hybrid management and deployment for Kubernetes clusters demonstrates how Azure Arc extends Kubernetes cluster management and configuration across your datacenters, multi-cloud environments, and edge locations. By extending the Azure Resource Manager (ARM) control plane, Azure Arc allows you to project your Kubernetes clusters deployed outside of Azure alongside those in Azure – enabling you to have a single interface to manage the sprawl of clusters. You can register any CNCF Kubernetes cluster that is running and start using services like Azure Monitor and Azure Policy. 

Azure Arc

Azure Stack HCI 

Use Azure Stack HCI switchless interconnect and lightweight quorum for Remote Office/Branch Office.  In ROBO scenarios, a primary business concern is minimizing costs. Yet many ROBO workloads are of utmost criticality with very little tolerance for downtime. Azure Stack HCI offers the optimal solution by offering both resiliency and cost-effectiveness. Using Azure Stack HCI, you can leverage built-in resiliency of Storage Spaces Direct and Failover Clustering technologies to implement highly-available compute, storage, and network infrastructure for containerized and virtualized ROBO workloads. 

Azure Stack HCI

Azure Stack Hub  

Back up files and applications on Azure Stack Hub describes an optimized approach to backup and restore of files and applications of VM-based user workloads hosted on Azure Stack Hub. With backup and restore being essential components of any BC/DR strategy, Azure Stack Hub delivers a scalable, resilient, easy-to-manage and cost-efficient backup solution that relies on a bomination and cloud and on-premises components.  

Azure Stack Hub

 Azure Security Center and Azure Sentinel 

Hybrid Security Monitoring using Azure Security Center and Azure Sentinel illustrates how to monitor the security configuration and telemetry of on-premises and Azure operation system workloads. Enabling Azure Security Center to monitor Windows and Linux servers, Azure Stack VMs, and integrating Azure Sentinel with Azure Security Center help you detect, hunt, prevent, and respond to threats across your entire hybrid estate – even resources hosted outside of Azure.   

Azure Security Center

To learn more about our Azure hybrid offerings, visit the Azure hybrid solutions page and check out our newest module on Microsoft Learn: Introduction to Azure hybrid cloud services.  

Written by Nate Waters, Product Marketing Manager Azure Hybrid.

Changing the behavior of Until Loop when the loop limit is reached

by Contributed | Dec 15, 2020 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

The default behavior of the Until Loop is to Succeed if all actions inside it are successful, and depending on your run after behavior, when the Loop limit is reached. This behavior can be changed from the code view of the Logic App.

The default behavior:

Actions are Successful, the Loop hits the limit and returns Success as all actions were successful. The limit was hit but the result is Success for the Loop.

Add loops to repeat actions – Azure Logic Apps | Microsoft Docs

Let’s say you wish to change this behavior and you require the Until Loop to fail when it reaches the Loop Limit.

Fail Loop when limit is reached behavior:

To let the Until Loop fail when the limit is reached; just add the below in the code behind in the JSON of the Until Loop, this option is not available in the GUI yet (at the time of writing this blog):

“operationOptions”: “FailWhenLimitsReached”,

 “Until_2”: {

                “actions”: {

                    “Execute_stored_procedure“: {

                        ………………………..

                    }

                },

                “expression”: “@equals(variables(‘myUntilStop’), true)”,

                “limit”: {

                    “count”: 5,

                    “timeout”: “PT1H”

                },

                “operationOptions“: “FailWhenLimitsReached“,

                “runAfter“: {

                    “Initialize_variable_8”: [

                        “Succeeded“

                    ]

                },

                “type”: “Until”

            }

and this is how to do it! As easy as that.