San Francisco, Dec 5 (IANS): Microsoft is opening up its Azure Machine Learning Service for data scientists and developers so that they can use the Cloud-based offering to quickly create and train Machine Learning (ML) models, and then deploy them in production.

The Azure Machine Learning Service was first made available in preview in September, and will become generally available starting February 1 next year, Microsoft said on Tuesday at a virtual event called Microsoft Connect(), an annual Cloud- and data-focused developer conference.

With Azure Machine Learning Service, developers can eliminate most of the heavy lifting involved in building and training ML models, the software giant said.

Some of the main features of the service include being able to automate ML model selection and tuning.

The biggest benefit therefore is a reduction in the time it takes to get those models up and running production, the company said.

There's also a new update to the Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB database service, which provides distribution across Azure regions for organisations that need Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based applications to run reliably on a global scale.

The new Azure Cosmos DB Shared Throughput Offer was made generally available on Tuesday.

Microsoft also announced updation of some of its Azure Cognitive Services to make it easier for developers to build more AI functions into their applications.

Azure Cognitive Services is a collection of application programming interfaces that allow apps to "see, hear, speak, understand and interpret" people's needs through natural methods of communication, the company said.