The Web is awash with cool, automated tools, and Microsoft has added to the pool during its BUILD week by unleashing a site that detects your age from photos. Simple system involves you popping in a picture, letting the software giant’s algorithms quickly assess it, and generating a result, which offers a guess at age as well as the gender. It has thrown up some funny results already, and if you want to try it out for yourself, check the specifics after the fold.
When looking to draw swarms of bystanders in to test your in-progress software, the best thing you can hope for is a viral it, and the tech arm of Twitter seems to be enjoying the camaraderie of Microsoft’s ‘How Old Do I Look?’ feature. Located over at how-old.net, it’s the kind of domain that really could have suited a number of niches, but if you’d like to give it a whirl, just point your browser over to the site.
The company’s longer-term goal is in obtaining real time insights pertaining to gender and age. It would certainly be invaluable for Microsoft to have a robot able to scan through images and offer relatively accurate information of this kind in the future, and even if the readings were sometimes off, a substantial percentage point of accuracy could give Microsoft a real edge in the minefield of the Web.
Despite the serious overtones, the How Old Do I Look tool is a bit like Fat Booth or Old Booth on mobile – purely fun. You can grab snaps of your friends and family, have Microsoft’s bot do its work, and flatter them with the results, although before doing so, you may want to run a few of your own photos through to ensure that you’re not being unfairly aged!
Tens of thousands of folks have already flocked to test it out, and while the novelty will probably wear off overnight, it’ll be intriguing to see what’s at the other end of this path that Microsoft is taking.
So, head on over to how-old.net, try it out, and share your comments with us via the usual channels.
You can follow us on Twitter, add us to your circle on Google+ or like our Facebook page to keep yourself updated on all the latest from Microsoft, Google, Apple and the Web.
