Does Azure Search support Chinese Pinyin

superlang 1

For example, We use Azure Cognitive Search to search Chinese word 微软, Wei Ruan is the pinyin format

How does Azure Cognitive Search support Chinese pinyin?

Grmacjon-MSFT 18,806 Reputation points

2021-12-20T21:52:02.353+00:00

Hi @superlang

Thanks for the question. I believe Azure Search supports Chinese Simplified & Chinese Traditional as stated in this Azure doc but I will reach out internally to the engineering to see if Chinese Pinyin is currently supported and will update this thread as soon as I hear back from them.

Best,
Grace

1 answer

Grmacjon-MSFT 18,806 Reputation points

2021-12-20T23:31:30.527+00:00

Hi @superlang

I was able to confirm with the engineering team that Azure Cognitive Search does not support directly Pinyin at this time.

You could consider using Microsoft Translator Text API that supports it and translate the results from Azure Search back and forth (from Chinese to Pinyin and the other way around) as needed:

Translator Text API - Microsoft Translator for Business

Hope that helps.

Please let us know if you have further questions.
Best,
Grace
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Grmacjon-MSFT 18,806 Reputation points

2022-01-06T17:55:42.24+00:00

Hi @superlang

just checking to see if the above response helped to answer your question.

Thanks,
Grace

Marisal 6 Reputation points

2022-12-31T19:46:17.073+00:00

Just wanted to say this was helpful for me. I've been wanting to find a way to better integrate multilingual pronunciation of transliteration (starting with pinyin and transliteration for korean and japanese but branching off from there to other languages) for what is predominantly English text. I don't know that it will be more effective to translate first rather than to look into a bot or some other programming that can learn some different transliteration pronunciations, but it's a good starting place to know that this isn't a built in solution).
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