Azure AI Language preview APIs 2024-05-15-preview or earlier clarification

Question

Hi,

There is some confusion in our team about the language in the advice "Azure AI Language preview APIs 2024-05-15-preview or earlier will be retired on 31 March 2025"

Does this refer ONLY to preview versions of the API, or does this also refer to any versions of the API before May 2024?

Several of our Custom Question Answering resources are flagged in the advice, but do not use a preview version of the API, but they do use an older, non-preview version. To add to the confusion, the latest advertised version of the Custom Question Answering API seems to be 2023-04-01, as per https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/rest/api/language/?view=rest-questionanswering-2023-04-01

Thanks,

Nathan.

Answer 1

This is from MS communication:
Azure AI Language preview APIs (2024-05-15-preview or earlier versions) will be retired on 31 March 2025. Please transition to the latest preview (2024-11-15-preview) or GA version (2024-11-01) of Azure AI Language API.

Preview APIs are retired because a new preview or GA version is available. We encourage you to transition to the latest API version prior to the retirement date. If you're using a GA feature in Azure AI Language, please transition to the latest GA API version, 2024-11-01. For preview features, transition to the latest preview API version, 2024-11-15-preview.

From now to 31 March 2025 you can continue to use 2024-05-15-preview or an earlier version of preview API in Azure AI Language. On 31 March 2025 – those preview APIs will be deleted and your requests to this API will return an error.

Required action:

To avoid service disruptions, please replace the Azure AI Language API version in your code to the latest version by 31 March 2025. If the feature you use in Azure AI Language is already generally available, please transition to the latest GA API version by replacing the "api-version" parameter in the API call to "api-version=2024-11-01". For preview features, replace with "api-version=2024-11-15-preview".

So, it seems to me only previous GA versions will stay. They are only deleting 2024-05-15-preview or an earlier version of preview API.