Hello Face API ... Helping developers build more intelligent apps

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Dear Developers,

Are you ready to power your Universal Windows Platform apps with facial recognition? Eager to get started with face API's?

At Build 2015 we announced a set of technologies dubbed Project Oxford that allows developers to create smarter apps, which can do things like recognize faces and interpret natural language even if the app developers are not experts in those fields.

The new collection of machine learning offerings is being provided to developers as part of Microsoft’s Azure portfolio. Project Oxford currently includes four main components:

Face recognition: This technology automatically recognizes faces in photos, groups faces that look alike and verifies whether two faces are the same. It can be used for things like easily recognizing which users are in certain photos and allowing a user to log in using face authentication. It’s the same technology that is behind this fun new website that guesses how old a person looks based on a photograph.

Speech processing: This technology can recognize speech and translate it into text, and vice versa. A developer might use it for hands-free tools such as the ability to dictate text or to have an automated voice read out instructions or other necessary functions

Visual tools : This service can analyze visual content to look for things like inappropriate content or a dominant color scheme. It also can detect and understand text in photos, such as a team name, and can sort photos by content, such as pictures of beaches, animals or food. Finally, it can automatically edit photos down to a recognizable and useful thumbnail for easy scanning.

Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS): This service, currently offered as an invite-only beta, enables applications to understand what users mean when they say or type something using natural, everyday language. Using machine learning, in which systems get better at predicting what the user wants based on experience, it then figures out what people want the app to do.

For those ready to dive in, here's an excellent Channel9 resource to get started with using Face API https://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/blog/Hello-Face-API .... 'Hello Face'

-Ahmed