You are building a social media messaging app.

For a social media messaging app that needs to determine the language of short text in real time, the most appropriate service is Azure AI Translator. Translator provides a low-latency language detection operation for text, returning the detected language code and a confidence score, and it’s optimized for interactive scenarios like chat and messaging. You can use detection on its own or feed the result directly into translation if needed.

Why not the others:

Azure AI Speech is for audio (speech-to-text, text-to-speech, speech translation), not text-only language detection.

Azure AI Language has language detection within its Text Analytics features, but Translator’s detect endpoint is the recommended, streamlined choice for real-time translation pipelines and chat apps.

Azure AI Foundry Content Safety is for moderation (toxicity, harassment, hate), not language identification.

Microsoft References

Azure AI Translator — Text Translation overview (includes language detection).

https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/ai-services/translator/

Text Translation REST API v3.0 — Detect operation.

https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/ai-services/translator/reference/v3-0-detect

Quickstart: Use the Translator text client libraries (shows detect + translate flow).

https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/ai-services/translator/quickstart-text-sdk