Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday turned up the heat on other technology giants by launching new image and video recognition products. This product would help Microsoft court businesses worried about running ads next to offensive content.

The Redmond, Washington-based company said its new Video Indexer could identify faces, voices, and emotions in moving pictures. Separately, its Custom Vision Search lets companies build apps that recognize images with just a few lines of code.

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For brands, knowing what's in the videos that they sponsor has become a hot issue since major companies began canceling ad deals with Alphabet Inc's Google this year over hate speech playing on its subsidiary YouTube. Microsoft's Video Indexer is similar to a tool Google launched in March; Amazon.com Inc also said last month it could flag insulting images via a cloud-based service, according to Venture Beat.

According to Home BT, Microsoft's latest moves underscore how its focus has evolved from its staple Windows software to the cloud, where it is competing with Amazon to sell data storage and computing power. Extra analytics such as image recognition may prove key to luring Web developers.

"It's hard to understand what's in the video" the longer it is, said Irving Kwong, a senior product director at Microsoft, in an interview ahead of the company's developer conference Build. He said Video Indexer, which analyzes videos far faster than humans can, could help a user "harness and get more out of the video content that you have."

The tools launched in preview by the Microsoft Cognitive Services unit on Wednesday includes a decision recommendation service with one aim apart from winning business: data.

Microsoft views the tools as a way to put powerful computing into people's hands and improve the tools at the same time because processing more data is key to reaching artificial intelligence. Others including Amazon are pursuing this strategy, with the prize being a new revenue stream.