Sky News will use facial recognition to identify celebs and nobility at the upcoming royal wedding

When viewers tune in to the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle later this month, they’ll have a secret weapon to help them sort the minor nobles from the foreign dignitaries: facial recognition.

UK broadcaster Sky News has announced it’s teaming up with tech startups and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to offer the service for its online stream of the upcoming nuptials on May 19th. As guests enter St. George’s Chapel in Windsor, they’ll be identified by Amazon’s Rekognition software and background information provided on-screen. Individuals’ names will appear as subtitles in the TV broadcasts, reports V3, and viewers will be able to access details on Sky’s app. The service will be called Who’s Who Live.

Image: Sky News / AWS

A screenshot of what the Who’s Who Live service will look like.

Sky says this feature is a first for a royal wedding. David Gibbs, the company’s director of digital news, said in a press statement: “This new functionality allows Royal Wedding viewers greater insight into one of the biggest live events of the year, wherever they are. We’re excited by the software’s potential and ability to give audiences new ways of consuming content.” The Hollywood Reporter suggests such functionality could soon show up in other broadcasts, like identifying celebrities on the red carpet at the Oscars, for example.

But while this feature will be useful, it raises questions about how and when it is appropriate to apply facial recognition to public broadcasts. There are also issues of data privacy. Did Sky News get permission from everyone attending the wedding to identify them in this way, for example, and where did they get the training data to teach their algorithms? We’ve reached out to the company with these questions and will update this story if we hear more.

Arguably, for celebrities and minor royals, being recognized in public is part of the job. And at past royal weddings, facial recognition (if you want to call it that) has been performed by royal correspondents. But at the very least, it will be interesting to see how AI fares at such a task. Facial recognition is easy, but not when the faces in question are covered by extravagant hats.