A website by Microsoft is using facial recognition to tell you how old you are. And if you ask me, it’s actually pretty accurate. Well, in at least most cases that I tested. The website, called How Old Do I Look?, allows you to find an image by searching on Bing.com, or you can upload your own photo. Their facial recognition algorithm will analyze the photo and tell you how old the person in the photo is. Or, if there are several people in the photo, it will look at all the faces and determine how old they are.
I took a look at a few of my own photos, and, well, let’s just see how accurate this website is.
This photo of me, (taken about two years ago) says I’m 74:
And here’s another photo, and I am apparently 63 years old. Well at least it’s getting better.
Now this one? Well, I’m closer to 50 in this photo. It’s me speaking several years ago, at a Pubcon conference. Still had the mustache.
Now this one here, taken around 2005 or so, I am apparently 39 years old. Those photos keep making me younger and younger! I was actually about 36 years old when the photo below was taken, so they have it within 3 years.
And finally, well, yeah. 33 years old. That’s right! Not exactly, though, it’s actually been touched up a bit with Photoshop. It’s about 13 years off. My latest headshot photo, taken last year.
It’s kind of interesting to play around with this site and the technology, I am surprised that Microsoft chose a domain name that has a hyphen in it in order to show off their facial recognition technology. As you can see, it’s still got some work to do, but I suppose that if you were to combine that facial recognition technology with the search data that Microsoft has, along with Facebook data, the I could only imagine the power of facial recognition nowadays.
Oh, and let’s try one more photo, the now infamous Bill Hartzer & Matt Cutts photo. Let’s see how old Matt Cutts is in this photo:
