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Face API

An AI service that analyzes faces in images.

Deliver low-friction, state-of-the-art facial recognition

Embed facial recognition into your apps for a seamless and highly secured user experience. No machine-learning expertise is required. Features include face detection that perceives facial features and attributes—such as a face mask, glasses, or face location—in an image, and identification of a person by a match to your private repository or via photo ID.

Advanced facial recognition

Verify identity or control access with ready-for-scale face recognition.

Easy to use

Add facial recognition to your apps—all through a single API call.

Privacy first

Maintain exclusive control over data. The service doesn't save images.

Built-in security

Rely on enterprise-grade security and privacy applied to both your data and any trained models.

Get to market quickly

With Face, there’s no need to build facial recognition from scratch. All it takes is a single API call to deliver these capabilities in your apps.

You control your data

The service doesn’t save images and you have exclusive control over data.

Fuel App Innovation with Cloud AI Services

Learn 5 key ways your organization can get started with AI to realize value quickly.

The Forrester report titled Fuel Application Innovation with Cloud AI Services.

Comprehensive security and compliance, built in

  • Microsoft invests more than USD 1 billion annually on cybersecurity research and development.

  • We employ more than 3,500 security experts who are dedicated to data security and privacy.

  • Azure has more certifications than any other cloud provider. View the comprehensive list.

  • Get accurate facial recognition at competitive prices

    Pay as you go based on the number of transactions, with no upfront costs.

Get started with an Azure free account

1

Start free. Get USD 200 credit to use within 30 days. While you have your credit, get free amounts of many of our most popular services, plus free amounts of 55+ other services that are always free.

2

After your credit, move to pay as you go to keep building with the same free services. Pay only if you use more than your free monthly amounts.

3

After 12 months, you'll keep getting 55+ always-free services—and still pay only for what you use beyond your free monthly amounts.

Trusted by companies of all sizes

"By enhancing our service with the Face API, we have a competitive advantage in markets that demand a high degree of facial detection accuracy."
Daniel Amitai, Vice President of Business Development, Cloudinary
Cloudinary
"Because the Cognitive Services APIs harness the power of machine learning, we were able to bring advanced intelligence into our product without the need to have a team of data scientists on hand."
Aaron Edell, Chief Product Owner, GrayMeta
A person working on a laptop.

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"We found Cognitive Services to be the missing piece in the equation, the one that we needed to bring this solution to market and really revolutionize the way people look at video."
Katie McCann, Vice President of Product and Engineering, Prism Skylabs
Hands holding a tablet displaying two trucks in a crash.

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"Thousands of partners sign into our platform every hour. The response time from the Face API is incredible, enabling us to verify our drivers without slowing them down."
Dima Kovalev, Product Manager, Uber
A hand holding a mobile phone displaying the Uber app.

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"It didn't take us long to realize Microsoft Cognitive Services had handed us a powerful set of computer-vision and artificial-intelligence tools that we could use to create great apps and new features for our customers in just a few hours."
John Fan, Cofounder and CEO, Cardinal Blue Software
A hand holding a mobile phone displaying the Pic Collage app.

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"Using the Cognitive Services APIs, it took us three months to develop a test pair of glasses that can translate text and images into speech, identify emotions, and describe scenery. If we had been working full time, we could have done it in two weeks."
Benoit Chirouter, R&D Director, Pivothead
A hand holding glasses from Pivothead.
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Documentation and resources

Get started

Guidance

Get clear guidance on the proper use of facial recognition to help ensure it fits your goals and achieves accurate results.

Read the Face API Transparency Note

Frequently asked questions about Face

  • Face and other Azure Cognitive Services offerings guarantee 99.9-percent availability. No SLA is provided for the Free pricing tier. See SLA details.

  • No, your images are automatically deleted after processing. Read our compliance and privacy policy.

Start building with Cognitive Services

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