Microsoft launched a new face detection tool on Thursday that can predict one's age and gender based on the uploaded selfie.
It's either you will like the results or not (especially if it tells you that you look older than your age), but the tech giant created the website as it attempts to improve its new face detection tool.
The website, called How-Old.net, was developed by combining a number of products, including the company's search engine Bing and cloud service Azure.
"We wanted to create an experience that was intelligent and fun could capture the attention of people globally, so we looked at the APIs available in the Azure Machine Learning Gallery. The gallery contains many finished intelligent services such as Face, Speech, and Vision which are part of a new suite called Project Oxford from Bing and Microsoft Research. The Face API has a demo page that uses the API to detect and extract information about faces in a photograph. We found the ability of the face API to estimate age and gender to be particularly interesting and chose this aspect of it for our project," the Machine Learning Blog team wrote in the site.
Microsoft was overwhelmed by the number of people who were interested in knowing their age from the computer point-of-view. The team behind the website initially expected only 50 people to try it then give them feedback. To their surprise, the site was accessed by over 35,000 users in just three hours.
"We were shocked. Within a few hours, over 35,000 users had hit the page from all over the world (about 29k of them from Turkey, as it turned out - apparently there were a bunch of tweets from Turkey mentioning this page). What a great example of people having fun thanks to the power of ML!"
