We've all had fun with image and facial recognition services from Google and Microsoft. Now a third giant, Amazon, has decided to enter the game by creating its own facial recognition application. Called Amazon Rekognition, it aims to provide open learning services for developers.
While Amazon's Rekognition tool isn't public like Google's drawing game and Microsoft's age-guessing bot, it appears to do exactly the same job. Specifically, it looks at photos and recognizes the faces of the people depicted, identifies their emotions, and adds labels to the objects. For example, to a photo of a dog, the AI adds the following labels: "animal," "pet," "dog."
Amazon’s new app will be available to all AWS users. Developers will be able to use facial recognition as a security measure for their apps, to sort their large photo collections with appropriate tags, and to build smart billboards that capture demographic data for their viewers.
Amazon Rekognition is currently available in specific regions (Northern Virginia, Oregon, and Ireland), but this does not mean that we cannot expect it to be available in our country at any moment.
Amazon has released alongside Amazon Rekognition some other AI such as Amazon Polly which converts text to speech and Amazon Lex for building conversational chatbots.
Notably, Amazon comes two weeks after Google pushed AI into its cloud , including a tool that can detect sentiment in multiple languages and a Jobs API that helps companies match job openings with potential hires.
