Microsoft's new APIs allow developers to give their apps a 'human side'

Build 2016 is a developer conference so it's only right we should see some cool new toys for the folks who build your favorite apps to play with. Microsoft's new cognitive set of 22 APIs fit that bill and will allow developers to give their apps a more human touch.

A result of years of AI and machine learning, apps will be able to include vision, emotion, video understanding, language, speech, knowledge, Bing search and more. And web app developers will also be able to take advantage.

One example shown off was the vision API and how it can recognize objects in an image and offer up a confidence score of its accuracy. It can also figure ou the relationship between objects in the image and provide a text based description of what you're seeing.

Another example is speech-to-text, and how its able to isolate background noise and even understand awkward speech, such as that from a child.

We also got to see a pretty amazing example of how these APIs can be put to real, life changing use. The Pivot Head Sunglasses can read moods and the photo app can guide its user to position the camera correctly and analyze documents for blind people. Pretty cool stuff.

For more from Build 2016 be sure to keep it locked to our dedicated page here

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Richard Devine
Managing Editor - Tech, Reviews

Richard Devine is a Managing Editor at Windows Central with over a decade of experience. A former Project Manager and long-term tech addict, he joined Mobile Nations in 2011 and has been found on Android Central and iMore as well as Windows Central. Currently, you'll find him steering the site's coverage of all manner of PC hardware and reviews. Find him on Mastodon at mstdn.social/@richdevine