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8.2: Case Study- Microsoft’s Decision to Remove Emotion Recognition Services

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    207252
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    Given the problematic nature of emotion recognition research, and as part of its responsible AI development and deployment, Microsoft decided to remove certain features from their Azure Face service, including capabilities that infer emotional states, gender, age, smile, facial hair, hair, and makeup.

    In a 2022 blog post, Microsoft acknowledged the need for AI systems to be trustworthy and appropriate solutions to the problems they are designed to solve. In the case of emotion recognition, the company highlighted several concerns that influenced their decision to remove these capabilities:

    Microsoft’s decision to remove emotion recognition services from their Azure Face platform demonstrates some of the biggest concerns with affect recognition technologies. Deploying technologies which do not have a solid theoretical underpinning and which may seriously impact people’s lives is clearly unethical. However, despite moves like this from big companies like Microsoft and IBM, the lure of emotion recognition continues developers to produce products for education.


    8.2: Case Study- Microsoft’s Decision to Remove Emotion Recognition Services is shared under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.

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