azure-ai-contentunderstanding-py

Azure AI Content Understanding SDK for Python

Multimodal AI service that extracts semantic content from documents, video, audio, and image files for RAG and automated workflows.

Installation

pip install azure-ai-contentunderstanding

Environment Variables

CONTENTUNDERSTANDING_ENDPOINT=https://<resource>.cognitiveservices.azure.com/

Authentication

import os
from azure.ai.contentunderstanding import ContentUnderstandingClient
from azure.identity import DefaultAzureCredential

endpoint = os.environ["CONTENTUNDERSTANDING_ENDPOINT"]
credential = DefaultAzureCredential()
client = ContentUnderstandingClient(endpoint=endpoint, credential=credential)

Core Workflow

Content Understanding operations are asynchronous long-running operations:

1. Begin Analysis — Start the analysis operation with begin_analyze() (returns a poller)
2. Poll for Results — Poll until analysis completes (SDK handles this with .result())
3. Process Results — Extract structured results from AnalyzeResult.contents

Prebuilt Analyzers

Analyzer	Content Type	Purpose
prebuilt-documentSearch	Documents	Extract markdown for RAG applications
prebuilt-imageSearch	Images	Extract content from images
prebuilt-audioSearch	Audio	Transcribe audio with timing
`prebuilt-vide