Microsoft has taken face detection and photo tagging to the next level. On Thursday, it launched "How Old Do I Look?," a tool that guesses the age and gender of the humans in any photo you give it. Upload a photo of yourself, and like magic, Microsoft will tell you just how old you are. Or aren't.
The website was initially announced yesterday at a San Francisco conference and was meant to be tested by only a few people. But it's quickly gone viral, to Microsoft's surprise.
"This is a fun story of how we were expecting perhaps 50 users for a test but — in the end — got over 35,000 users and saw the whole thing unfold in real time," wrote Corom Thompson and Santosh Balasubramanian, two Microsoft engineers.
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The tech company expected that users would shy away from uploading pictures of themselves, and instead experiment with stock images. This was not the case. Since the site's launch, Twitter has been full of opinions, with some users calling it a massive "ego-killer" while others praised it as "the greatest tool ever." Mixed opinions aside, this might be the most buzz Microsoft has garnered in a while.
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