Microsoft has been developing a set of APIs for speech, face and emotion recognition under the banner of Project Oxford for the past several months. In September, I wrote a blog post that demonstrated how to use their Face Identification APIs to match faces and tag them. I also wrote a blog post on how to use their OCR service to tag photos and extract text content. Microsoft has also added new services for recognizing emotions in photos.
These APIs have been available in preview but are now being rolled out in production under the new brand “Microsoft Cognitive Services”. There is a new web site and pricing is now available for each API. The APIs will be available on demand as a cloud service.
Microsoft has also provided a video that shows their vision around using applied artificial intelligence to enhance every day life, in this case for someone who is disabled.