Microsoft has recently unveiled its new face recognition tool that guesses your age based on a photo, built to demo the capabilities of Azure. It is pretty much like a new face detection API for developers, but it also came up with a rather cool demo for anyone to test out. It’s a website called ‘How-old.net’ that attempts to predict the age and gender of a person just by scanning a picture. And it’s really fun to try it out.

Microsoft combined a number of its products and services, including Bing and Azure, to create the website. It stated: “We wanted to create an experience that was intelligent and fun could capture the attention of people globally, so we looked at the APIs available in the Azure Machine Learning Gallery. The gallery contains many finished intelligent services such as Face, Speech, and Vision which are part of a new suite called Project Oxford from Bing and Microsoft Research. The Face API has a demo page that uses the API to detect and extract information about faces in a photograph. We found the ability of the face API to estimate age and gender to be particularly interesting and chose this aspect of it for our project.”

‘How-old.net’ allows you to upload a picture before the site recognizes faces and analyzes them to determine their age. The site is powered by Microsoft Azure’s Face APIs that not only recognize features and predict both gender and age.

But it is not always accurate, actually not even that close. I have tried two times and it shows that i am more than 30, though i am actually 25. Microsoft says that it is striving to improve the new face detection API, so hopefully How-Old.net will offer more precise predictions over the next several months.