Wish you could know how old you really look? There’s a website for that!
Microsoft’s How-Old.net is a simple little website that previews what the company has been working on. It uses facial detection technology and learns over time from all the data collected by the photos submitted to guess your age.
How to Use the Site to Guess Your Age
Trying the site out for yourself is super easy, and you can use it from both a desktop computer or a mobile device. Simply type how-old.net into your preferred web browser (desktop or mobile web), and press (or tap) the “Use your own photo” button located near the bottom of the screen.
You’ll be able to select a photo file to submit to the site. You’ll be given the choice to use the search bar to search for a photo, use an existing photo (shown on the page) or to snap a photo of yourself or choose an existing one.
Just click or tap the big red button labeled Use your own photo to either upload a photo from your computer or select a photo/snap one from your mobile device. Within seconds, the website will detect your face and give you an age. If you have multiple people in your photo, it does a good job detect everyone’s faces and guessing their ages too.
How Accurate Is It?
Unhappy with your results? Don’t book an appointment for major plastic surgery just yet if you’re disappointed about how old (or even how young) the site thinks you look. In fact, if you submit a few different photos of yourself to the site, you’ll probably notice a big difference in age guesses for each photo — reflecting just how inaccurate the site can be.
While the website is quite good at detecting faces and gender, it’s not incredibly accurate guessing people’s ages just yet. Microsoft says it’s still working on improving this.
Try uploading a few different photos to see how different your results can be. If you notice a wide range in age guesses, you’ll be able to confirm that the technology still needs some work.
Privacy Concerns
According to Microsoft, any photos you upload to the site are not stored. Once you upload your photo and are given your age guess, your photo is discarded from memory.
How It Went Viral
As soon as word got out about the site, it picked up steam across the web pretty quickly. Within just hours of it being emailed to several hundred people to try out, How-Old.net saw over 210,000 photo submissions from 35,000 users across the globe.
About Microsoft’s Face API
Microsoft’s Face API can detect human faces, compare similar ones, organize photos of faces based on their similarities and identify previously tagged faces in photos. The technology for its face detection currently includes attributes such as age, gender, emotion, pose, smile, facial hair and 27 landmarks for each face identified in a photo.
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