Microsoft’s New Face Detection Tool, Guesses Your Age and Gender from Your Photo

Microsoft has launched a set of new machine learning APIs in public beta under the name ‘Project Oxford’ and it’s How-Old.net demo for this service went viral. This service uses some of the new developer services that are a part of ‘Project Oxford’.

This new facial analysis tool tells the user about his/her age and gender. The user needs to upload the photo of his/her face and then it automatically figures out the age and gender of the person in the picture.

This API also offers face detection in images, verification of faces to check if two faces belong to the same person and it also has the ability to find similar looking faces, as reported by TechCrunch.

It also has speech recognition and in future the service will help developers understand the user’s intent. A custom language understanding will soon be built in the application as the fourth API.

The service went viral on social networks attracting both criticism and fun, as it failed to recognise the correct ages of the people. It mostly got everyone’s age wrong and hence, turned into a meme. In 24 hours the ‘#howoldrobot’ got 21,656 tweets, a whooping response in just a day’s time! Have a look at some of the exciting tweets below.

Microsoft India (R&D) Pvt. Ltd.