Face.com | Developers Newsletter


July / 2011

Hey,

Since our launch in May 2010, over 20,000 developers signed up and used our APIs, building amazing products, apps, and services. We’ve got an exciting API release coming up, and we wanted to share it with you first!

(BTW, if you’re not interested in receiving our developer updates, follow this link and you’ll never get these announcements again. Promise.)

Introducing Moods and Facial Expressions

As of today we’re releasing a new set of facial analysis attributes for alpha testing, allowing you to estimate moods and key facial expressions. To try these new attributes, just pass our API a photo for face detection, and there’s no need to pass any personal user identifiers. Check it out:

New: Mood Estimation

For us humans, figuring out a person’s mood comes naturally. We use it all the time to express our reaction to things happening around us. Now you can estimate a person’s mood automatically using our API! Face detection calls can now return a new ‘mood’ attribute with 5 possible values: Happy, Sad, Surprised, Angry, and Neutral.

New: Facial Expressions

Smile detection is one of the popular usages of the API, so we decided to improve our smile detection accuracy, and expanded our set of available facial expressions to include the state of a person's lips, enabling you to figure out if a person in the photo has their lips sealed, parted or kissing :)

Code Samples

If you want to try out our latest API without coding, check out our Sandbox Console on the developers’ site. We’ve added a new ‘attributes’ parameter where you can specify which attributes you want retrieved: “all”, “none”, comma-separated, or leave empty for default (which returns the original 3 attributes: gender, glasses, and smiling).

For example, here's a call to get some photos of one of the celebrities in our celebs.face.com namespace, Bar Refaeli, and focus on the smiling, mood and lips attribute:

Now consider you want to see only the photos where Bar (from the same photo urls above) is smiling widely - so we'll use the tags.get method with filters for mood:happy, smiling:true and lips:parted:

What can you do with Moods and Facial Expressions?

This attribute pack is a result of requests from our partners and developer community. Here are some of the uses that we’ve heard of:

Selecting "best" photos for display
Measuring reactions on live chats
Photo search filters

Dating preferences
Competitions
And much more…

Face.com API now supported with SSL

Recently we received several requests from our developers to support API calls under SSL.

Starting today, the face.com API is supporting https calls. The good old regular http protocol is supported as well and nothing will change in the currently running applications that use the API. To allow developers to test the https connection we added a new "Use SSL" feature in the API Sandbox

Tell us what you think!

The new attribute sets are still very much in alpha. We’d love to hear what you’re working on, suggestions, bug reports, and any feedback you have. Check out our forums, or contact our team directly.