#HowOldRobot: Microsoft’s new tool that guesses your age an unexpected hit

SINGAPORE — It must have been a pleasant surprise for Microsoft when its new tool meant to detect one’s age unexpectedly went viral.

The tool, using the company’s new face detection APIs, identifies a user’s age by analysing a selfie of the user. All the user has to do is to upload a selfie of onto how-old.net and wait for a few seconds for the number to pop up.

Sometimes the number is close, spot on or ridiculously far apart from the user’s actual age. But that’s half the fun, and Microsoft’s engineers acknowledged it in a blog post.

“Now, while the API is reasonably good at locating the faces and identifying gender it isn’t particularly accurate with age, but it’s often good for a laugh and users have fun with it,” wrote Mr Corom Thompson and Mr Santosh Balasubramanian, Engineers in Information Management and Machine Learning at Microsoft in a blog post.

Users uploaded their selfies and pictures of celebrities, including One Direction, 5 Seconds of Summer, Korean stars, and even characters such as Yoda, Quaker Oats mascot and zombies from The Walking Dead. They then shared the results on social media, with the hashtag #HowOldRobot. TV host Ellen DeGeneres tweeted a picture of herself with her age estimated at 27 (she’s 57 this year), saying: “It’s clearly a genius.”

For those who might be offended by an insulting age estimate, the website has an apology tagged on after each result: “Sorry if we didn’t quite get the age and gender right – we are still improving this feature.”

According to the blog post, the company only expected some 50 users to test the feature, meant to be a demo for a keynote of Microsoft’s Build2015 developer conference. However, more than 35,000 users tested it within hours and more than 210,000 images were uploaded.

On twitter, there were 15,000 tweets about #HowOldRobot within 24 hours of the site’s launch on April 30, reported the Guardian. As of today (May 5), the hashtag has been tweeted more than 80,000 times according to analytics firm Topsy.

This article was published on TODAYonline.