AI-900 Practice Question: Describe features of computer vision workloads on Azure
Which Azure AI service can read text from a photo of a street sign taken by a mobile device?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many exam-takers confuse Azure AI Vision's OCR capabilities with Azure AI Language's text analysis features, or mistakenly think Azure AI Speech can process visual text, when in fact only the Read API within Azure AI Vision is designed for extracting text from images.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Azure AI Vision (Read API / OCR)
Azure AI Vision's Read API (part of the Computer Vision service) is designed to extract printed and handwritten text from images, including photos of street signs. It uses optical character recognition (OCR) to detect and digitize text, making it the correct choice for reading text from a mobile device photo.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Azure AI Speech
Why it's wrong here
Azure AI Speech handles audio signals—speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and speaker recognition—by processing waveform features like MFCCs and spectrograms. It does not operate on image pixel data, so it cannot recognize or extract text from a photograph; using it would require the text to be spoken aloud rather than visually captured.
- ✓
Azure AI Vision (Read API / OCR)
Why this is correct
Azure AI Vision's Read API is purpose-built for OCR, using a convolutional neural network pipeline to detect text regions, recognize characters, and output bounding boxes, line/word confidence scores, and recognized text. It extracts both printed and handwritten text from real-world photos of signs, which is exactly what the scenario requires.
- ✗
Azure AI Language
Why it's wrong here
Azure AI Language's core competency is natural language processing over existing text—key-phrase extraction, sentiment analysis, and named entity recognition. It has no optical character recognition component and cannot scan pixels or images to discover text; it only consumes text that is already in a digital, machine-readable format.
- ✗
Azure AI Translator
Why it's wrong here
Azure AI Translator is a machine translation service that operates on text or documents already represented as string data, mapping source-language phrases to target-language phrases via neural MT models. It has no image ingestion or OCR capability, so it cannot read text out of a photo of a sign; it only transforms text that is already provided.
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Related to this question
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Azure Machine Learning Studio
Key term
OCR
Optical Character Recognition is technology that converts images of text, like scanned documents or photos, into machine-readable text data.
Key term
Azure AI Vision
Azure AI Vision is a cloud-based service from Microsoft that uses pre-built machine learning models to extract information from images and videos, such as objects, text, faces, and scene descriptions.
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