Microsoft Research reveals emotion recognition tools

Microsoft on Wednesday revealed new Project Oxford tools including one capable of recognising emotion.

The emotion tool can so far tell when a face was expressing anger, contempt, fear, disgust, happiness, sadness, surprise, or was simply neutral.

According to commentators, advertising and social networks are increasingly realising the potential of software to recognise users and personalising experiences with products.

Machines were first taught to figure out the age of a person, then how closely related two people might be, and now Microsoft had launch an algorithm designed to recognise how humans felt, simply by reading users' faces.

The public beta release of a set of advanced machine learning technologies for developers was announced by the team behind Microsoft's Project Oxford.

"Humans have traditionally been very good at recognizing emotions on people's faces, but computers? Not so much," reads a blog post published to Microsoft's website. "That is, until now."

According to the author of the post, the emotion tool, could currently be used to help computers identify eight core emotional states in photos of human faces - anger, contempt, fear, disgust, happiness, neutral, sadness and surprise.

Even though Microsoft did not reveal which pictures (or how many of them) were used to "train" the system, the emotions it could recognise were said to be based on facial expressions that are "cross-culturally and universally communicated."

The Emotion API, was designed to become smarter as it received more data, much like most AI systems.

Anyone having an internet connection can access the beta version of the emotion tool on Microsoft's website and upload a photo to test it out.