Microsoft adds compact speech, vision and tool use to the Phi-4 family
Microsoft released the 5.6B Phi-4-multimodal model for text, vision and speech plus the 3.8B Phi-4-mini text model with a 128K context window and function calling. Both became available through Azure AI Foundry and model repositories for local or edge-oriented deployment.
Why it matters: The pair offered a practical alternative when latency, privacy or device constraints matter more than using the largest available model.