There’s a new website address that is getting plenty of buzz online, because How-Old.net from Microsoft allows users to upload a photo of themselves and, by using face recognition technology, the website will take a wild guess at the person’s age.
Oh, I guess this thing is pretty accurate after all. #HowOldRobot pic.twitter.com/PzsdNHULTU
— TWC SportsNet (@TWCSportsNet) April 30, 2015
The How-Old.net website only expected to have around 50 folks using the website for their initial test, so says an article written by two engineers in Information Management and Machine Learning at Microsoft named Corom Thompson and Santosh Balasubramanian, who say they ended up with 35,000 users — which has grown beyond that now that the site has gone viral, according to its presence on the “What’s Hot” list by Alexa.com, an Amazon company.
“We were playing with Microsoft’s newly released Face detection API’s through a webpage called http://how-old.net. This page lets users upload a picture and have the API predict the age and gender of any faces recognized in that picture. We sent email to a group of several hundred people asking them to try the page for a few minutes and give us feedback – optimistically hoping that at least 50 people would give it a shot. We monitored our real time analytics dashboard to track usage and, within a few minutes, the number of people using the site vastly exceeded the number of people we had sent our email to.”
Yeah, that’s what we thought. @JLo #HowOldRobot #flawless pic.twitter.com/anha22TzbN
— On Air/Ryan Seacrest (@OnAirWithRyan) April 30, 2015
Indeed, the How old do I look ? Microsoft website has made the news big time, with publications from Today to PC World and beyond writing about the new tool. Whereas some guesses are pretty accurate, such as when the How-Old.net tool guessed that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was 42 years old when in actuality he is 47, other guesses are even broader. Upon testing, for ourselves, the How-Old.net website — admittedly, using a photo with a nice and bright filter — and the Microsoft tool guessed the age of the sample to be 22 years of age instead of 46 years old, which is quite an ego boost.
The #HowOldRobot has some pretty funny reactions on Twitter.
As reported by the Inquisitr , looking younger and better is a quest for many image-focused folks, one reason why butt implants and plastic surgery sessions are surging.
Oh, ffs #HowOldRobot . I’m not that haggard. (It’s off by 14 years) pic.twitter.com/SC45xsdZnG
— Peter Merholz (@peterme) April 30, 2015
[Image via Microsoft]
