Head over to Microsoft’s how-old.net, upload a photo of yourself, and the site will spit out a prediction for how old you are—as well as your gender. Did it guess right? Probably not. But that doesn’t mean it’s not fun.
The website is powered by Microsoft’s new Face API, launched this week at the company’s annual Build Developer Conference. The Face API gives developers the ability to analyze an image, detect faces, and then to complete more complex tasks, like identifying whether two faces are the same, or finding other similar faces from a database.
How Old Do I Look is meant mostly as an illustration of some of the possibilities of the tool—obviously, there is additional coding involved here. It’s using a database of faces with known gender and ages to try to determine how old people are.
We tried out the website with lots of different images of ourselves and others, and while sometimes its prediction is close, the How Old Do I Look app isn’t what anyone could reasonably consider remotely accurate. In fairness, they developed the whole thing in just a day, so we should maybe cut them a little slack.
Real age: 116
real age: 21
It’s fun! Check it out and post your results below!
Oh, and if this kind of technology creeps you out, remember—companies only ever show us a fraction of what they’ve developed.
[How Old Do I Look? and TechNet via @alyssabereznak]