Kairos is excited to announce that we have just issued our largest update to the Kairos Facial Recognition API.

Since our launch on 11/12/13, we have received a ton of feedback from you, our customers, and we have listened and did our best to incorporate your requests into this release.

Here's an overview of the changes:

• We have dramatically lowered our pricing at every tier of our pricing plans, up to 80% off in some instances.

• In addition to lowering prices, we also increased the number of API calls included with each tier, some by more than an order of magnitude.

• You asked to be able to submit images directly to the API without passing a URL We now accept an “image” parameter for the “detect”, “enroll”, and "recognize" calls. You can now pass in a Base64 encoded image directly into the request body. If you wish to continue passing in images hosted on an Internet accessible server you can still use the “url” parameter.

• You asked to simplify the basic facial recognition workflow. With the old API you had to do a “detect” call, then an “enroll” or “recognize” call using the data returned from the "detect". With the new API, you just do the "enroll" or "recognize", we do the rest.

• The "detect" call is still available if you need to find more detailed information about the faces found within the image, but it is no longer required in order to do an "enroll" or "recognize".

• We have moved the passing of the APP_ID and APP_KEY from the JSON POST body to the HTTP header. This is a big change from previous where we required the APP_ID and APP_KEY to be passed in the JSON POST body.

• Previously only our top tier paid plans had access to manage multiple galleries of images. We have opened this up to all plans, including our FREE plan.

• To manage these galleries, we have added three new methods to enable you to manage galleries of images:

  1. gallery/list_all: Lists the galleries you have created.

  2. gallery/view: Shows the subjects that are enrolled in a specific gallery.

  3. gallery/remove_subject: Removes a subject from a gallery.

NOTE: Progress doesn't come without a cost however, in order for us to enable all these new features and lower prices, we did have to make a sacrifice. Existing enrolled galleries will need to be re-enrolled in the system.

In addition to the features we announced here, we have more exciting features planned to be released within the coming weeks including an improved matching algorithm, features to adjust the image quality prior to enrolling and recognizing as well as an improved documentation portal and client libraries in a variety of different languages.

For more details, visit us at developer.kairos.io/docs

As always feel free to reach out to us via This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or Twitter @lovekairos.

Cole Calistra
Kairos CTO @kairoscto