A Camera App that Gets to Know Your Friends

05-10-2012 • http://www.technologyreview.com, By Rachel Metz

For a couple of years, Face.com has offered websites and apps a facial-recognition service that can identify people in photographs, figure out how many faces there are in the picture, which is male or female, and how old they might be. Facebook is widely believed to be one of its customers, though Face.com refuses to comment on their relationship.

But with mobile photo sharing gaining popularity, Face.com CEO Gil Hirsch says the company—which started out by building face-finding and -tagging Facebook apps—wanted to build a mobile app that, unlike existing apps that use the company's technology, would give users real-time feedback about who their cell-phone camera is pointed at. It has done so with Klik, a free smart-phone camera app with the ability to recognize faces in real time and, if it can't recognize them, learn who it is you're shooting.

Originally released in January, the latest version of Klik rolled out on Thursday for the iPhone (an Android version is coming, but Face.com won't say when). It's a bit like Instagram, but with an AI twist.