Face Recognition API Coming Soon For Google Glass Developers

Face Recognition API Coming Soon For Google Glass Developers

After Steve Lee, director of product management for Google Glass told The New York Times that the company has kept face recognition features off the product owing to security concerns for the moment; it surely hasn’t stopped third party API makers from taking the route.

A San Francisco based start-up Lambda Labs, is all set to release a face recognition API to developers in the next week, reports TechCrunch. The app has already been available in a beta version and is already being used by 1000 developers. The technology is expected to offer functionalities such as remembering faces, finding people, and even look for relevant matches among other similar suggests the company’s co-founder Stephen Balaban. That being said, all this will not happen in real time — you will have to take a picture, and route it to the app developer’s server for a match, and then you will be notified. And all this will take some time, provided Google makes changes in its development kit for the technology in the near future.

Although Lambda Labs has all its bases covered for now, Balaban is yet a bit sceptical about how it’ll go down with Google. He told TechCrunch that although the API doesn’t violate the Glass’ Terms of Service, or Google’s API policies being the first face recognition toolkit for the gadget, tweaks in the terms cannot be ruled out, considering all the privacy concerns making the rounds in the US. However, its API policy does explicitly mention “Glass is not intended for use in connection with applications and services that might be subject to industry-specific privacy regulations. Do not create applications that generate or transmit data that is subject to these regulations”. So it is possible this news will ruffle some feathers.