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Microsoft offends everybody with its age recognition website

Microsoft has launched a new website, which aims to guess the age of users by analysing a single photo. However, judging by early results it seems to be a bit crap at it.

The new How-Old.net website, which has already managed to offend half of internet users and spawned parodies from the rest, encourages users to upload pictures only to tell most of them they look way older than they actually are.

This looks-young-for-his age 33 year-old was labelled 38 on the first, and 40 when trying to skew the results with a younger-looking photo taken from a more favourable angle. The cheek of it all! At least it got the gender right.

TrustedReviews’ considerably younger news editor was slammed with an estimate of 41, so it’s not just sour grapes either.

Microsoft says it consults a database of photos with known ages and genders in order to make its prediction, but says its still working on perfecting the tool.

Read more:
Microsoft Build 2015: Just the highlights

It says the entire thing took just a day to put together, so we’re officially putting it down to teething problems rather than it being time to look into new moisturiser and potentially even plastic surgery solutions.

The whole thing seems more aimed at testing the power of Microsoft’s Machine Learning and Azure platforms so try not to be too offended if it thinks you should be collecting your pension.

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