How old do you really look? Microsoft will tell you!

How old do you really look? Well, if you decide to ask Microsoft, chances are you probably look about 47 or something.

Everyone knows that guessing someone’s ages is a very touchy subject, but unfortunately Microsoft missed that memo. The software giant has created a new website called How-Old.net, a new analysis tool that guesses your age and it has become the latest Internet obsession!

The new site was revealed on Thursday at the company’s Build 2015 conference to show off the power of its cloud service platform. The tool allows you to upload a photo and then it detects and quickly analyzes your face. It will then spit out an estimated age and gender.

It can be unnervingly accurate art times – as well as horribly inaccurate! I decided to test it out on some of the staff members and found that a different photo of the same person, taken within a few months of each other could yield a different ages.

In one of the photos that was uploaded, a 21 year old employee was guessed to be 36 years old, but when we uploaded a different photo of her, with different lighting, she was estimated to be about 25 years old.

It all sounds very innocent, doesn't it? Well, not if Microsoft suspects you to be about 30 years older than you really are! The trick is to provide How-Old.net with a well-lit, flattering photo and it usually comes up with a fairly accurate result – give or take a few years.

Microsoft made the site as a demo for its Azure services and said it took a couple of developers just a few days to put together the entire site. It uses the face detection routines from the company’s Projects Oxford, which has the ability to recognise a face, guess how old the person is, and also guess the gender.

But, why does this site even matter? Well, it doesn't. It’s just a silly way to show off some cloud services, but it’s still entertaining.

Remember that age is just a number, Microsoft!

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Written By: Christine Romans
CopyWriter at The Computer Guyz Cape Town