Moscow’s authorities plan to announce a competition to create a large-scale facial recognition system comprising more than 200,000 CCTV cameras in the capital, the Russian capital’s Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said on Thursday.

Axar.az reports citing Russian media.

The facial recognition system was first introduced when Moscow hosted the 2018 FIFA World Cup, Sobyanin recalled, speaking at a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on issues devoted to developing artificial intelligence technologies.

"Now we have tested the video facial recognition in the metro, through cameras at entrance halls and detected dozens of criminals who had been on a wanted list. This year, very soon, we will announce a competition to create a large-scale video recognition system jointly with the Interior Ministry, comprising more than 200,000 CCTV cameras in Moscow. It will become one of the world’s largest, to be only rivalled by Chinese systems," Sobyanin said.

The mayor also said a speech recognition technology has been introduced in the capital. "Today between 40% and 70% of calls are serviced at our call centers through chatbots," Sobyanin said. Now speech recognition technologies have been tested in transport, schools and medical institutions, "facilitating the work of a huge number of people," he added.

Today some 167,000 CCTV cameras have been working in Moscow, with 16,000 users having access to them. These are staff members of law enforcement agencies, state and municipal organizations. All of them have their access level, and each log-in in the system is recorded.