Reviewing past and future investments
With the explosion of AI among enterprises, Microsoft's investment in their Cognitive Services suite started back in 2015 with Project Oxford. At the Microsoft Build conference (typically targeted at developers) that year, it was announced that this new set of ML-based REpresentational State Transfer (REST) API and SDK tools were being built. There have been many directional changes and iterations of deployments, but the majority of the services released back then are still being used today. The only major difference is the approach to Face APIs, as discussed briefly in the last section.
Updates
Microsoft maintains a blog for notable changes to Azure and tags articles based on technology. Cognitive Services-specific articles are tagged and can be found here in their complete form: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/topics/cognitive-services.
Later on, the Azure updates blog was announced and articles about new services and features...