About

How-Old.net is a web application developed by Microsoft which uses facial-recognition technology to predict the age and sex of people pictured in photographs submitted to the site. Upon its release in late April 2015, the hashtag #HowOldRobot became a trending topic on Twitter as many users began tweeting about the poor accuracy of the app's predictions.

History

In April 2015, Microsoft launched the site How-Old.net as a public demo for their web application "How Old," inviting users to submit photographs for their algorithm to guess their age and sex (shown below). The site was created to promote the Azure Machine Learning Gallery collection of machine learning projects analyzing speech, facial recognition, vision and text.

Reception

On April 29th, the tech news blog Technet^[5] published an article on their Machine Learning Blog authored by Microsoft engineers Corom Thompson and Santosh Balasubramanian, who described what it was like to work on the How-Old.net application. On the following day, the tech news blog Overmental^[2] and BuzzFeed^[3] highlighted several screenshots of the app guessing the age and sex of various celebrities and fictional characters (shown below).

Also on April 30th, many Twitter users shared their results from using the application with the hashtag #HowOldRobot,^[14] with many mocking this software's inaccurate predictions. That day, the hashtag received over 46,000 mentions according to the Twitter analytics site Topsy.^[6] In the coming days, several other news sites published articles about the online reaction to the web application, including UpRoxx,^[4] The Daily Dot,^[7] Today,^[8] Tech Crunch,^[9] The Guardian,^[10] Mashable,^[11] US Weekly^[12] and The Verge.^[13]

Traffic

According to Microsoft engineers Corom Thompson and Santosh Balasubramanian, the website was initially sent out in an email to only a few hundred people but had reached over 35,000 users within three hours of launch.^[5]

Search Interest

Not available.

External References