Cannot create Azure AI Speech resource with Azure for Students subscription

It seems that your Azure for Students subscription is subject to a region optimization policy that restricts the regions where you can deploy resources. This policy is designed to ensure that your subscription has access to the best available regions for optimal performance. Since you are seeing the error message indicating that your resource deployment is disallowed by Azure, here are a couple of steps you can take:

1. Select an Alternative Region: Since you have already tried multiple regions without success, it may be beneficial to check if there are specific regions that are allowed for your subscription. You might want to refer to the Azure documentation or contact support to get a list of regions that are available for your subscription type.
2. Submit a Remediation Request: If you have a clear business need or if there are resources already deployed in a specific region, you can submit a support request through the Azure portal. This request should only be made if there is a valid reason for needing access to a specific region.

To submit a support request, you can follow these steps:

• Sign in to the Azure portal.
• Navigate to Help + support.
• Create a new support request and specify your issue regarding region access.

Since you mentioned that you see 0 assignments under the policy section, it indicates that there are no specific policies assigned to your subscription, which may suggest that the restrictions are inherent to the Azure for Students subscription itself.

If you continue facing issues, contacting Azure support directly would be the best course of action to clarify the available options for your subscription.

References:

• Resolve location ineligible errors
• Resolve errors for request disallowed by policy

Hello happy xu,

Welcome to Microsoft Q&A and Thank you for reaching out.

You're seeing this error because Azure for Students subscriptions are restricted by Microsoft to a fixed set of “best available regions”, and Speech Services (Azure AI Speech / Cognitive Services) are not allowed in those restricted regions for this subscription type. Even though no policy appears under “Assignments,” the restriction is enforced at the subscription level and cannot be viewed or modified.

Why the deployment fails

Azure for Students has built-in limitations that:

Limit which regions you can deploy to

Restrict certain AI/Cognitive Services resources

Prevent removing or overriding the region policy

So when deploying an Azure AI Speech resource, the service is blocked in all regions accessible to your subscription. That’s why you receive:

“Resource was disallowed by Azure… best available regions…”

Things you can still check

Before concluding, verify these two basic checks (although in nearly all student subscriptions this will still fail):

Resource Provider Registration

• Azure Portal → Subscriptions → Your Azure for Students subscription
• Resource providers → confirm Microsoft.CognitiveServices is registered

Role Assignment Ensure you have Cognitive Services Contributor role on the subscription. (If you are the subscription owner, this is already covered.)

These checks usually won’t bypass the region restriction but help confirm there are no additional configuration issues.

Here are the options to use Speech Services

Use a Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) subscription

Speech Services deploy normally in a PAYG subscription. You can still set budgets or stay within the free tiers.

Use Azure AI Speech Studio without deploying a resource

You can try speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and other Speech capabilities directly in the browser:

https://speech.microsoft.com

This works even if your subscription cannot deploy Speech resources.

If you need Speech Services for actual development or coursework, creating a Pay-As-You-Go subscription is the only reliable path.

Please refer this

• Azure resource providers and types
• Create a Cognitive Services resource using the Azure portal
• Deploy resources with Azure for Students

I Hope this helps. Do let me know if you have any further queries.

Thank you!