So, a few days ago, the internet had a new toy: How Old Robot – a very simple website where you can upload a photograph and it will guess your age and gender. For many people the guess was about right, but there were some howlers, with very similar images being uploaded and giving age results differing by (several) decades!
The site doesn’t hide the fact that it’s a learning tool based on Microsoft’s facial recognition technology and is built on the Azure platform as an example of how quickly it is to build and deploy sites using Azure. What started off as a quick demo from the Build conference soon became viral, with people all over the world loading their photos into the app and sharing the results on social media. This is exactly what Microsoft wanted and they’ve been oh so clever with this and here’s why.