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.

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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

Richard Devine is the Managing Editor at Windows Central, where he combines a deep love for the open-source community with expert-level technical coverage. Whether he’s hunting for the next big project on GitHub, fine-tuning a WSL workflow, or breaking down the latest meta in Call of Duty, Forza, and The Division 2, Richard focuses on making complex tech accessible to every kind of user. If it’s happening in the world of Windows or PC gaming, he’s probably already knee-deep in the code (or the lobbies). Follow him on X and Mastodon.