Real Time, Real You: Announcing General Availability of Face Liveness Detection
A Milestone in Identity Verification We are excited to announce the general availability of our face liveness detection features, a key milestone in making identity verification both seamless and secure. As deepfake technology and sophisticated spoofing attacks continue to evolve, organizations need solutions that can verify the authenticity of an individual in real time. During the preview, we listened to customer feedback, expanded capabilities, and made significant improvements to ensure that liveness detection works across three platforms and for common use cases. What’s New Since the Preview? During the preview, we introduced several features that laid the foundation for secure and seamless identity verification, including active challenge in JavaScript library. Building on that foundation, there are improvements across the board. Here’s what’s new: Feature Parity Across Platforms: Liveness detection’s active challenge is now available on both Android and iOS platforms, achieving full feature parity across all supported devices. This allows a consistent and seamless experience for both developers and end users on all three supported platforms. Easy integration: The liveness detection client SDK now requires only a single function call to start the entire flow, making it easier for developers to integrate. The SDK also includes an integrated UI flow to simplify implementation, allowing a seamless developer experience across platforms. Runtime environment safety: The liveness detection client SDK integrated safety check for untrustworthy runtime environment on both iOS and Android devices. Accuracy and Usability Improvements: We’ve delivered numerous bug fixes and enhancements to improve detection accuracy and user experience across all supported platforms. Our solution is now faster, more intuitive, and more resilient against even the most advanced spoofing techniques. These advancements help that businesses integrate liveness detection with confidence, providing both security and convenience. Security in Focus: Microsoft’s Commitment to Innovation As identity verification threats continue to evolve, general availability is the start of the journey. Microsoft is dedicated to advancing our face liveness detection technology to address evolving security challenges: Continuous Support and Innovation: Our team is actively monitoring emerging spoofing techniques. With ongoing updates and enhancements, we ensure that our liveness detection solution adapts to new challenges. Learn more about liveness detection updates. Security and Privacy by Design: Microsoft’s principles of security and privacy are built into every step. We provide robust support to assist customers in integrating and maintaining these solutions effectively. We process the data securely, respecting user privacy and complying with global regulations. By collaborating closely with our customers, we ensure that together, we build solutions that are not only innovative but also secure. Learn more about shared responsibility in liveness solutions We provide reliable, long-term solutions to help organizations stay ahead of threats. Get Start Today We’re excited for customers to experience the benefits of real-time liveness detection. Whether you’re safeguarding financial transactions, streamlining digital onboarding, or enabling secure logins, our solution can strengthen your security. Explore: Learn more about integrating liveness detection into your applications by this tutorial. Try it Out: Liveness detection is available to experience in Vision Studio Build with Confidence: Empower your organization with secure, real-time identity verification. Try our sample code to see how easy it is to get started: Azure-Samples/azure-ai-vision-sdk A Step Toward a Safer Future With a focus on real-time, reliable identity verification, we’re making identity verification smarter, faster, and safer. As we continue to improve and evolve this solution, our goal remains the same: to protect identities, build trust, and verify that the person behind the screen is really you. Start building with liveness detection today and join us on this journey toward a more secure digital world.Announcing Azure AI Content Understanding: Transforming Multimodal Data into Insights
Solve Common GenAI Challenges with Content Understanding As enterprises leverage foundation models to extract insights from multimodal data and develop agentic workflows for automation, it's common to encounter issues like inconsistent output quality, ineffective pre-processing, and difficulties in scaling out the solution. Organizations often find that to handle multiple types of data, the effort is fragmented by modality, increasing the complexity of getting started. Azure AI Content Understanding is designed to eliminate these barriers, accelerating success in Generative AI workflows. Handling Diverse Data Formats: By providing a unified service for ingesting and transforming data of different modalities, businesses can extract insights from documents, images, videos, and audio seamlessly and simultaneously, streamlining workflows for enterprises. Improving Output Data Accuracy: Deriving high-quality output for their use-cases requires practitioners to ensure the underlying AI is customized to their needs. Using advanced AI techniques like intent clarification, and a strongly typed schema, Content Understanding can effectively parse large files to extract values accurately. Reducing Costs and Accelerating Time-to-Value: Using confidence scores to trigger human review only when needed minimizes the total cost of processing the content. Integrating the different modalities into a unified workflow and grounding the content when applicable allows for faster reviews. Core Features and Advantages Azure AI Content Understanding offers a range of innovative capabilities that improve efficiency, accuracy, and scalability, enabling businesses to unlock deeper value from their content and deliver a superior experience to their end users. Multimodal Data Ingestion and Content Extraction: The service ingests a variety of data types such as documents, images, audio, and video, transforming them into a structured format that can be easily processed and analyzed. It instantly extracts core content from your data including transcriptions, text, faces, and more. Data Enrichment: Content Understanding offers additional features that enhance content extraction results, such as layout elements, barcodes, and figures in documents, speaker recognition and diarization in audio, and more. Schema Inferencing: The service offers a set of prebuilt schemas and allows you to build and customize your own to extract exactly what you need from your data. Schemas allow you to extract a variety of results, generating task-specific representations like captions, transcripts, summaries, thumbnails, and highlights. This output can be consumed by downstream applications for advanced reasoning and automation. Post Processing: Enhances service capabilities with generative AI tools that ensure the accuracy and usability of extracted information. This includes providing confidence scores for minimal human intervention and enabling continuous improvement through user feedback. Transformative Applications Across Industries Azure AI Content Understanding is ideal for a wide range of use cases and industries, as it is fully customizable and allows for the input of data from multiple modalities. Here are just a few examples of scenarios Content Understanding is powering today: Post call analytics: Customers utilize Azure AI Content Understanding to extract analytics on call center or recorded meeting data, allowing you to aggregate data on the sentiment, speakers, and content discussed, including specific names, companies, user data, and more. Media asset management and content creation assistance: Extract key features from images and videos to better manage media assets and enable search on your data for entities like brands, setting, key products, people, and more. Insurance claims: Analyze and process insurance claims and other low-latency batch processing scenarios to automate previously time-intensive processes. Highlight video reel generation: With Content Understanding, you can automatically identify key moments in a video to extract highlights and summarize the full content. For example, automatically generate a first draft of highlight reels from conferences, seminars, or corporate events by identifying key moments and significant announcements. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG): Ingest and enrich content of any modality to effectively find answers to common questions in scenarios like customer service agents, or power content search scenarios across all types of data. Customer Success with Content Understanding Customers all over the world are already finding unique and powerful ways to accelerate their inferencing and unlock insights on their data by leveraging the multi modal capabilities of Content Understanding. Here are a few examples of how customers are unlocking greater value from their data: Philips: Philips Speech Processing Solutions (SPS) is a global leader in dictation and speech-to-text solutions, offering innovative hardware and software products that enhance productivity and efficiency for professionals worldwide. Content Understanding enables Philips to power their speech-to-result solution, allowing customers to use voice to generate accurate, ready-to-use documentation. “With Azure AI Content Understanding, we're taking Philips SpeechLive, our speech-to-result solution to a whole new level. Imagine speaking, and getting fully generated, accurate documents—ready to use right away, thanks to powerful AI speech analytics that work seamlessly with all the relevant data sources.” – Thomas Wagner, CTO Philips Dictation Services WPP: WPP, one of the world’s largest advertising and marketing services providers, is revolutionizing website experiences using Azure AI Content Understanding. SJR, a content tech firm within WPP, is leveraging this technology for SJR Generative Experience Manager (GXM) which extracts data from all types of media on a company's website—including text, audio, video, PDFs, and images—to deliver intelligent, interactive, and personalized web experiences, with the support of WPP's AI technology company, Satalia. This enables them to convert static websites into dynamic, conversational interfaces, unlocking information buried deep within websites and presenting it as if spoken by the company's most knowledgeable salesperson. Through this innovation, WPP's SJR is enhancing customer engagement and driving conversion for their clients. ASC: ASC Technologies is a global leader in providing software and cloud solutions for omni-channel recording, quality management, and analytics, catering to industries such as contact centers, financial services, and public safety organizations. ASC utilizes Content Understanding to enhance their compliance analytics solution, streamlining processes and improving efficiency. "ASC expects to significantly reduce the time-to-market for its compliance analytics solutions. By integrating all the required capture modalities into one request, instead of customizing and maintaining various APIs and formats, we can cover a wide range of use cases in a much shorter time.” - Tobias Fengler, Chief Engineering Officer Numonix: Numonix AI specializes in capturing, analyzing, and managing customer interactions across various communication channels, helping organizations enhance customer experiences and ensure regulatory compliance. They are leveraging Content Understanding to capture insights from recorded call data from both audio and video to transcribe, analyze, and summarize the contents of calls and meetings, allowing them to ensure compliance across all conversations. “Leveraging Azure AI Content Understanding across multiple modalities has allowed us to supercharge the value of the recorded data Numonix captures on behalf of our customers. Enabling smarter communication compliance and security in the financial industry to fully automating quality management in the world’s largest call centers.” – Evan Kahan, CTO & CPO Numonix IPV Curator: A leader in media asset management solutions, IPV is leveraging Content Understanding to improve their metadata extraction capabilities to produce stronger industry specific metadata, advanced action and event analysis, and align video segmentation to specific shots in videos. IPV’s clients are now able to accelerate their video production, reduce editing time, access their content more quickly and easily. To learn more about how Content Understanding empowers video scenarios as well as how our customers such as IPV are using the service to power their unique media applications, check out Transforming Video Content into Business Value. Robust Security and Compliance Built using Azure’s industry-leading enterprise security, data privacy, and Responsible AI guidelines, Azure AI Content Understanding ensures that your data is handled with the utmost care and compliance and generates responses that align with Microsoft’s principles for responsible use of AI. We are excited to see how Azure AI Content Understanding will empower organizations to unlock their data's full potential, driving efficiency and innovation across various industries. Stay tuned as we continue to develop and enhance this groundbreaking service. Getting Started If you are at Microsoft Ignite 2024 or are watching online, check out this breakout session on Content Understanding. Learn more about the new Azure AI Content Understanding service here. Build your own Content Understanding solution in the Azure AI Foundry. For all documentation on Content Understanding, please refer to this page.Announcing Face API Service SDKs for Liveness
The Azure AI Vision Face team updated the public preview of Liveness Detection at //build in May. You can read more about it here You Are Real: More Secure Identity Verification - Microsoft Community Hub. We are now happy to announce the availability of client library for building an app server for Liveness Detection in the four core Azure languages. .NET (C#): https://www.nuget.org/packages/Azure.AI.Vision.Face/ Java: https://central.sonatype.com/artifact/com.azure/azure-ai-vision-face Python: https://pypi.org/project/azure-ai-vision-face/ JavaScript; https://www.npmjs.com/package/@azure-rest/ai-vision-face The liveness solution integration consists of two separate components: a frontend mobile/web application and an app server/orchestrator. With the library, you can now easily build the app server needed for a complete liveness solution in your preferred programming language. This includes operations for creating a liveness session, querying the liveness detection result and audit logs. You can learn more from this tutorial.You Are Real: More Secure Identity Verification
Explore the critical role of liveness detection in safeguarding identity verification in a digital era where identity fraud risks are at an all-time high. Discover how this technology could reshape security across industries, from banking and healthcare to remote work and beyond, ensuring authenticity in every digital interaction. Learn about the latest advancements and real-world applications that make liveness detection a cornerstone of modern cybersecurity practices.Are You Alive: Enhancing Azure AI Vision Face API with Liveness Detection
We are excited to announce the public preview of Liveness Detection, an addition to the existing Azure AI Face API service. Facial recognition technology has been a longstanding method for verifying a user's identity in device and online account login for its convenience and efficiency. However, the system encounters escalating challenges as malicious actors persist in their attempts to manipulate and deceive the system through various spoofing techniques. This issue is expected to intensify with the emergence of generative AIs such as DALL-E and ChatGPT. Many online services e.g., LinkedIn and Microsoft Entra, now support “Verified Identities” that attest to there being a real human behind the identity.
