How do Face and Emotion Recognition APIs enable Development of More Interactive Apps

Here we are, with a majority of our lives dependent on not only mobile apps but a variety of other such technological tools that help ease various facets of our lives. But if there’s one thing you should know about technology, it’s that it never stops evolving; so much so, that today, mobile apps are very ordinary now. But since apps, mobile or web, along with multiple other solutions remain crucial drivers of business across the entire gamut of industries in the world, and there has been plenty of innovation to help enterprises to differentiate their offerings from their rivals in the market. One such novelty that has recently emerged is face and emotion recognition technology. Don’t get us wrong, this technology has been around for a while now, but their implementation in the context of improving customer experience is relatively recent.

Nonetheless, they are here and how! Microsoft offers a terrific solution for the integration of such technologies via its Cognitive Services APIs that are aimed at facilitating the development of really advanced apps where the driving principle is the organic user interaction, no matter the platform or device. The APIs make use of machine learning, a subset of artificial intelligence, and are widely deemed highly conducive for the development of high-level apps.

So, if you, too, are planning to get started with using Face and Emotions recognition technology for your Xamarin.Forms app, we have listed some of the necessary steps to help you get started with it.

1. Cognitive Services APIs subscription: First things first, get a subscription of the service you require, i.e., Face and Emotion APIs. It may also help to remember that Cognitive Services offer RESTful APIs, i.e., one can interact with them via HTTP requests irrelevant of the platform provided you use a language that includes REST support.

Here’s a snippet that shows how an image is sent to the emotion recognition service:

POST https://api.projectoxford.ai/emotion/v1.0/recognize HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: application/json
Host: api.projectoxford.ai
Content-Length: 107
Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key: YOUR-KEY-GOES-HERE
{ "url": "http://www.samplewebsite.com/sampleimage.jpg” }

P.S.: Add your key and replace the image URL with the address of the target image.

2. Create the app: For this step, first launch Visual Studio, of course, and then when the New Project dialogue box pops up, go to Visual C#, the cross-platform node, and then select Blank XAML app template. The next step is to call the FaceEmotionRecognition solution.

Those are the most fundamental steps of the process. But if you are still wondering what comes next, well, you will need to introduce plug-ins, install NuGet packages once the solution is right to go, design the UI, and so forth.

Though it may seem like a long drawn out process, trust us when we say the union of these services with Xamarin mobile apps will enable companies to deliver unprecedented levels of natural interaction, thus significantly elevating users’ experiences and, consequently, the business.