Rise of the dinner party app

It is the ultimate dinner party problem — you recognise the face but can’t for the life of you remember who they are. Thankfully, technology now has an answer, and a new breed of mobile phone apps is set to revolutionise dinner parties, telling us exactly who is in the room and even who is the most interesting to talk to.

The most impressive app is Klik, an iPhone app from Israel. It does the seemingly impossible, and can recognise people simply by taking a photograph of them.

Using a complex algorithm, it analyses the measurements of your face, and claims more than 90 per cent accuracy. For the forgetful, it’s great — just point it at a fellow diner and, if they are a Facebook friend, it will show their name above their head.

For privacy reasons, the app currently only tells you the identity of people you are connected to on Facebook. But face.com, the firm behind the app, also lets other software integrate its technology, so expect to see a lot more face recognition coming up.

The firm is also rumoured to be powering Facebook’s facial recognition but has never confirmed this.

“Face recognition has always had a lot of promise but was never quite there — we want to change that, and make it a reality,” said Gil Hirsch, the company’s founder. He claims the system is so accurate that it can even spot your mood from a photo.

However, if you’re at a party and don’t know anyone in the room, there is an app for that as well.

Andrea Vaccari moved to the US in 2006 and lived in five different cities. “Each time I had to build a new circle of friends,” he said.

“It was difficult, and very inefficient. You have to keep chatting to people to find the interesting people you’d like to talk to.

“The best conversations were when we realised that we had friends in common, or studied at the same university — I even met someone from my home town of Verona in Italy.”

Vaccari decided to build an app to help him, enlisting the help of friends to create Glancee, a free iPhone app. It uses a combination of your Facebook profile and the GPS chip on your phone to show you who is nearby, and what interests you have in common. Should a good match (be it in networking or even potentially dating) pop up nearby, the app can alert you and let you message the person for a chat.