Tech Talk: How-Old.net

The How-Old.net was unveiled at the BUILD 2015 conference, which uses intelligent API's to discern the age of the users' pictures. It was brought together by Microsoft and Bing under Project Oxford, which showed off one of the many facets of Azure.

The website subtitled "How old do I look?", detects the face and uses a series of algorithm in Face API to find the age and gender to come up with the penultimate or an even accurate age. 

I plugged Ed's picture in and came out with - ahem - 37. That's 10 years younger than he was at the time of when this picture was taken. As you can see from the bottom of the picture, it is still a work in progress as they group and analyse the image data. The images are not kept if anyone is worried about that!

It doesn't always going accordingly to plan as they've added 6 years to me at the time of when this was taken. If you're not satisfied with the result, then you get an option to "Get a human opinion" which may be more lenient (or less as I found out in some cases).



So what you have is a "game" where you try and guess the age of others online with you as they guess yours. What I had was a vast range which brought it actually closer to my age which I assume works on the average of what the users feel that my age of the photo is. This time it got me closer to what I was in the photo by 2 years off.

You can give the website a shot yourself and see how it fairs with you or download the app if you have a Windows Phone which offers the same mechanics of the website.

#HowOldRobot