Microsoft is retiring a controversial facial recognition feature that claims to identify emotion in people's faces from videos and photos. As part of an overhaul its AI policies, the US tech giant is removing facial analysis capabilities that infer emotional states, like surprise and anger, from Azure Face. It's also retiring the ability of the technology platform to identify attributes such as gender, age, smile, hair and makeup. Microsoft's Azure Face is a service for developers that uses AI algorithms to detect, recognise, and analyse human faces in digital images. It is used in scenarios such as identity verification, touchless access control and face blurring for privacy.

With improvements, especially those that raise ethical concerns like a greater inaccuracy with darker skin tones, such programs may help in diagnosing and managing Parkinson's, the researchers wrote. Their study, "Detecting facial characteristics of Parkinson's disease by novel artificial intelligence (AI) softwares," was published in the journal Brain Supplement. Parkinson's-associated motor symptoms, such as tremors and muscular rigidity, affect a person's ability to show emotions via facial expressions, with implications for a patient's sense of self-esteem and engagement in social life. Artificial intelligence (AI) may be more able than other methods to track and quantify these changes with disease progression. AI-based facial recognition technology analyzes facial characteristics, such as age, emotions, and skin texture, and could prove useful in assessing Parkinson's-related changes.