During Build 2015 Day 2 keynote earlier today, Microsoft demonstrated a new website located at How-Old.net, which utilized Machine Learning to guess how old you are. So what’s the purpose of this demonstration? Microsoft wanted to show off how smarter applications can use facial recognition and large amounts of data to make smart guesses.
Using the service is really easy. All you have to do is head over to How-Old.net and choose a photo from Bing or upload your own photo. It’s not quite accurate yet (for example, an old picture of mine when I was in my twenties reflected an age of 30).
“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,” Microsoft explains. You can read the full in-depth technical blog post here.
Remember, the whole point of this website is to give you an idea of what Microsoft has in mind with Machine Learning. Just a little taste of how amazing technology can be. Give it a shot and let us know what you think about the website.
Further reading: Build 2015, How-Old, Machine Learning, Microsoft
