“Humans have traditionally been very good at recognizing emotions on people’s faces, but computers? Not so much; that is, until now,” Microsoft says in a blog post announcing the latest developments to its emotion-detection software.
Microsoft’s Project Oxford team has released a new tool that analyzes eight “core” emotional states, including anger, contempt, fear, disgust, happiness, neutral, sadness, and surprise. These are identified using “universal facial expressions” that indicate those feelings.
You can try a demo of the tools today through this website. We tried it on a few video game characters; click through the images in the gallery above to get a closer look. Note that Microsoft warns this tool “is experimental, and not always accurate.”
“The tools, many of which are used in Microsoft’s own products, are designed for developers who don’t necessarily have machine learning or artificial intelligence expertise but want to include capabilities like speech, vision, and language understanding in their apps,” Microsoft said in a blog post.
Previously, Microsoft launched an age-detection tool. We tried that on gaming characters, too.