This is a whole new level of machine learning from Microsoft. The tech giant just created a website where you could find out in seconds how old you look or according to CNN how old “computer algorithm thinks you are.”
I tried a couple of pictures and my own selfies and the result was amazing and the same time funny! The result in some was 90% accurate while some was way off the mark, sometimes 50% inaccurate. What the website does is analyze the picture you uploaded in seconds and tell you how old it thinks you are based on your look, and each analysis comes with an apology “Sorry if we didn’t quite get the age and gender right – we are still improving this feature.”
I think you gotta try it yourself. It’s simple: Upload a selfie, wait a few seconds — then the machine gives you a number and gender.
And since it can analyze anyone’s photo, you can compare yourself to your friends, family, and foes. I did with two of my pictures, one was 3 years below my age while the other was 5 years above my age.
That goes to show that guessing someone’s age is a dangerous game, even for a robot and computer with some of the finest state of the art algorithms. That’s probably why the site comes with the sheepish apology.
The company unveiled the website at a conference Thursday as a way to show off its new software.
Part of a new initiative called Project Oxford, Microsoft says you could use this face detection technology for tasks like sorting through a large photo collection.
But we’re human — so we’ll probably just use it to judge our own looks.
And everyone else’s. Here are some other pictures I tried
