Microsoft on Thursday made available its new custom vision, face recognition and Entity Search interfaces to developers who want to add more artificial intelligence into their apps and services.

The announcement comes with the public preview of Custom Vision service as part of the Microsoft Cognitive Services collection of cloud services on the Azura Portal. Developers can use Custom Cision to build intelligent apps that distinguish between objects and correct identify them with precision.

Along with improvements to Custom Vision, Microsoft released a major upgrade to its Face API, giving developers the ability to recognize up to 1 million faces.

Microsoft also released Bing Entity Search, which brings rich context about people, places, things and local businesses to any app, blog or web site as part of the search capabilities of Cognitive services. For now, the entities include famous people, places, movies, TV shows, games, and books.

Many scenarios can include Bing Entity Search. For instance, “a messaging app could provide an entity snapshot of a restaurant, making it easier for a group to plan an evening,” Microsoft Corporate Vice President, artificial intelligence and research Joseph Sirosh wrote in a blog post. “A social media app could augment users’ photos with information about the locations of each photo. A news app could provide entity snapshots for entities in the article.”

The API enables companies to add elements such as location information to photos that appear in social media posts or embed information on restaurants and other buildings like retailers.

The updates are critical in order for Microsoft to remain competitive and to keep pace with or surpass rivals like Amazon, Google, and IBM.