Microsoft is demonstrating how developers can take advantage of new Windows features with a new bulletin board app. Called FamilyNotes, it takes advantage of advanced Universal Windows Platform (UWP) capabilities including speech recognition and facial recognition.
Those sophisticated technologies come by way of Microsoft Cognitive Services, the recently launched suite of APIs. When the suite was first launched earlier this month, Microsoft placed a strong focus on its capacity to recognize and transcribe natural speech, escalating an arms race with other major IT companies like Apple and Google that are also aggressively pursuing speech and voice recognition technologies. But FamilyNotes also shows how Microsoft Cognitive Services can be used to implement facial recognition, with the app able to identify specific notes with the users making them based on their facial biometrics.
Notably, in a blog post explaining how developers can take advantage of facial recognition, Microsoft emphasizes that developers must be sensitive to user privacy, asserting, “you need to make sure everyone who uses the app is OK with Microsoft potentially keeping copies of the images transmitted,” and adding, “If you publish an app that uses this feature, you must include a privacy statement that explains that this is happening.” With Facebook facing legal action over its use of facial recognition, and the IBIA having recently thrown its support behind the NTIA’s facial recognition guidelines, Microsoft is evidently paying close attention to this emerging issue as it proceeds with its own facial recognition technology.
Source: Building Apps for Windows Blog
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June 22, 2016 – by Alex Perala
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