
How Old Do I Look? - espadrine
http://how-old.net/#
======
gchenMsft
Hi all, I'm a research engineering manager on the Microsoft Project Oxford
Face API team, thanks for the interest! This website makes use of the Project
Oxford Face API technology we announced yesterday
([http://www.projectoxford.ai](http://www.projectoxford.ai)). The age
prediction is an experimental feature based on MSR face research investment.
With Project Oxford's beta REST API we make this available to developers.
These models will improve over time, please keep the feedback coming.

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larsiusprime
Maybe I'm cynical but I'm wondering if this just uses facial recognition to
match your photo online on social media, then looks for a birthdate :P

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300bps
Did you try it? Because in using several pictures of me and other people I
know it seemed wholly inaccurate. If they were cheating, they're not very good
cheaters.

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centizen
I am often told that I look very young for my age, and people generally guess
my age several years lower than it is. This tool guessed the correct age right
away, which really impressed me. Thanks for the confidence boost Microsoft!

The accompanying article is also very interesting and well written to be
readable by someone who isn't totally up to date with the latest in facial
recognition software.

~~~
ubertaco
I uploaded a photo with a picture of myself (I'm 25) and my 11-year old
sister. I got guessed as 44, she was guessed at 74.

I know I look older than my age (though I wouldn't think 19 years older), but
my 11-year-old sister coming up as 74 was surprising. What's 63 years, give or
take?

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narrator
I uploaded Keanu Reeves' photo from Wikipedia when he was 48. It said 41. So
yeah, Keanu ages at a slower rate than the rest of us[1].

1.[http://keanuisimmortal.com/](http://keanuisimmortal.com/)

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huehue
I've just lost 20 minutes guessing the age of Hitler portraits.

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sytelus
I think it might not be entirely clear what this site represents. It's
actually quick demo of ML services available on Azure. I think it uses Deep
Learning and the power of it is to demonstrate that you can wire up something
like this yourself without write a line of code for deep learning algorithms
or even owning any servers at all for heavy GPU processing. I wish they had
put code for this website on Github so people can tweak and spawn new
versions.

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bcruddy
Tried two pictures. 47 and 31. I'm 24.

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mrhyperpenguin
Note that there's a difference between predicting your age and estimating how
old somebody looks (i.e. you could look older for your age).

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tjradcliffe
The results on every photo I tried were ludicrously wrong. The closest it got
on photos of me was about five years older than me, but it ran anywhere up to
20 years too old.

The same thing on photos of others I tried: a 22-year old man was estimated to
be 49, a fifty-year-old woman--who is generally considered to look young for
her age--to be 69. Those are ages that no one would ever guess based on looks.

So I'd say the algorithm needs a little more work.

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nodata
Non-SSL, and no explicit statement that my photo won't be reused? Cool site,
but I'm not using it.

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mod
I expect you're quite the outlier.

There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of pictures of me on the internet already. I
certainly don't care if this site has one, and I couldn't care less about its
transfer being encrypted.

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nodata
Of course I'm an outlier, I'm on HN. We're all outliers.

But we are the techies who will remind people: "don't forget that's not
encrypted", "don't forget they might re-use your photograph".

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m-app
This. My girlfriend was happily uploading picture after picture until I asked
her semi-rhetorically "I wonder what they're doing with all those uploaded
pictures?" and after thinking about that for a second she closed the tab.

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Raphmedia
It doubles my age on all my photos. It's the beard, I guess.

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omegavesko
Yeah, I uploaded my high school graduation photo and it guessed 27. Guess it
weighs facial hair a bit too heavily.

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jetskindo
I took a picture the day before I turned 28 and the day after. This tool got
both of them right.

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unclesaamm
Looks like this is a demo for the Microsoft Azure ML. The main value-add here
seems to be integration with the rest of Microsoft's technology suite, with
its visualization, live streaming stuff, etc. For the actual age/gender
estimation, I'd be curious to see if it's much better (or better ta all)
compared to OpenBR ([http://openbiometrics.org/](http://openbiometrics.org/)).

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Bill_Dimm
They should really run this against a bunch of photos from a dating site to
measure the difference between the claimed age and guessed age and then
compare to the result from whatever training set they used. I'm guessing they
would get a bimodal distribution for dating site photos -- some people
claiming to be younger than they are, and some people giving their actual age
but using very old photos.

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inverba
I tried it with three people all age 24. The ages I received in response were:
41, 33, and 22. It seems like beards strongly influence the result.

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petercooper
I'm at a family thing so just tried it on about 5 people in a row. My two
daughters it got 100%. My mother in law was guessed to be 10 years younger
than she is (she was happy). My father in law was spot on (early 60s). This is
pretty impressive. (I should note that it was VERY bad with dark/poorly lit
shots with the eyes hard to see so we moved to a naturally lit space.)

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ColinWright
From one photo it guessed 24, from another it guessed 52, both less than my
true age. I'm sure it will improve, but that's not very impressive.

Having said that, assuming it's fully automated, it is actually impressive
that it should be attempting anything like this at all. Not that many years
ago it would have been completely infeasible to anything of the sort.

Still, I'm definitely not 24.

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luiscabrera
Hello, I am a program manager at Microsoft. I would like to point you to the
Azure Machine Learning Gallery (
[https://gallery.azureml.net/](https://gallery.azureml.net/)).

There you can find both Machine Learning API (including the one used in how-
old.net). We have many services that allow you to harness the power of machine
learning: Speech APIs, Recommendation Engine, Text Analytics, Customer Churn
Prediction APIs, etc.

Harness the power of machine learning today!

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runarb
Not to bad. Some margin of error is to be expected. Tried two pictures of me,
taken when I was 31.

Guessed 27 for
[http://www.searchdaimon.com/div/Runar_Buvik_smal.jpg](http://www.searchdaimon.com/div/Runar_Buvik_smal.jpg)

Guessed 35 for
[http://www.searchdaimon.com/div/Runar_Buvik_Causal.jpg](http://www.searchdaimon.com/div/Runar_Buvik_Causal.jpg)

Both pictures was taken the same week if I recall correctly.

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irremediable
I'm in my early twenties, as are most of my friends. But it consistently
guesses we're 10-20 years older than that. I wonder whether that's to do with
the population it was trained on?

OTOH, we're all PhD students, so maybe we're all just stressed out and look
old.

Interestingly, I have long hair, which I think is why it sometimes
misclassifies me as female. And when it does that, it seems to consistently
give me a younger age.

~~~
alistairSH
That's ok, I'm 37 and it guessed I was 81 in one photo and in two others, it
couldn't detect my face at all. To be fair, I was wearing a bike helmet in the
81 image, sunglasses in one failed image, and a baseball cap in the third.

OTOH, my wife will be pleased to know it underestimated her age by a decade.

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suchow
If you're interested in the human side of age perception, we're running a
study at [http://testmybrain.org](http://testmybrain.org) ("Understanding
other people") where you judge people's age based on a photograph. We're
looking at individual differences in face perception — how your age, race, and
experience affect your judgment of others.

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datalus
The quality of the prediction also matters on the quality of the photo. I
tried the photos that I do have of myself online, which each have a distinct
lighting profile. One is a soft, orange glow in a restaurant... the guess was
off by +11 years. The next photo has a portion of the left side of my face
obscured by shadow. This was off by something like +31 years.

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Marcus316
Tried this picture: [https://scontent.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-
xpf1/v/t1.0-9/11040377...](https://scontent.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-
xpf1/v/t1.0-9/11040377_10100621243021700_1069248627051998394_n.jpg?oh=e0fd957e41abfe1d3fcd4d950811a678&oe=55C8BA49)

Told me age 25. I'm flattered. ;)

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ggchappell
I don't get it. When I click on "Use This Photo", it always says, "Couldn’t
detect any faces. Please verify that the image is valid and less than 3MB."
When I type anything in the search box, it always says, "Oops, something went
wrong. Please try searching again."

Just what am I supposed to be doing on this page?

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jqm
Three pictures of myself.

2 most recent, one with beard and one without are both 1 year older than I
actually am... not bad.

One from 4 years ago was guessed at one year younger than I actually was,
again, not bad. But according to this, I've aged 6 years in the last 4. See
what programming will do for you?

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zacharyz
Just going by the test images it seems to rate everything about 5 years
younger than what I would guess (people and their kids, kids being the same
age and obviously not twins).

With that said, it guessed my age nearly spot on. When I get carded most
people think I am far younger.

~~~
JadeNB
Everyone here is getting judged younger; I must be the only one who it thinks
is actually older. I am 34, but it thinks I am 36 to (in very bright lighting)
56. It seems to be closest to believing that I'm 39.

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3minus1
Haha, it said this picture of gary coleman was 45
[https://tse4.mm.bing.net/th?id=JN.b8hUEXkcJ%2buUgxWJ5PAwdw&p...](https://tse4.mm.bing.net/th?id=JN.b8hUEXkcJ%2buUgxWJ5PAwdw&pid=Api)

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ableal
It may amuse, or bemuse, the authors that sticking the tongue out got an 11
year old tagged as 64, with a bonus sex change thrown in.

The other, accidentally studious looking, 11 year old kid in the same photo
was spot on.

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Ecio78
I tried various "images" of Jesus Christ: 39, 37, 41 44, 72(!) :)

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Nadya
It tells me Obama is anywhere from 39 to 52 in frontal shots - depending
entirely on the lighting.

Using some stock photographs of front-facing actors, it gets less accurate the
more detailed the shot is.

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abvdasker
Got my age at the time of the picture exactly right. Very cool.

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dgabriel
I took three pics of myself with Photo Booth just now, and depending on the
lighting and position of my chin got 20, 34, and 47. I'll take the average?

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omegavesko
Huh. When I read the title I figured it would be a crowdsourced system where
people guessed the age and it just showed you the average.

This is much more interesting.

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pdxgene
My headshot from age 35? 27. My recent headshot (I'm 40): 42. A photo I took
_just now_ with PhotoBooth? 29.

Seems like a slot machine...

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magic_beans
I'm a 23 year-old woman... How-Old guessed 30... I'm not sure how I feel about
that...

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irremediable
FWIW, I'm a 22-year-old man, and it consistently puts me in my 40s. I might
look a little older than I am, but not by that much... I suspect you and I
(and many others) just have faces that don't agree with the classifier.

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durbin
I always get that I look younger by like 10 years but this algorithm nailed it
exactly. Bummer.

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goshx
I'm always told I look older. This tool seems to agree... 10 years older.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
I hear the same thing. This tool thinks I'm 20 years older than I really am.

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adrianlmm
I'm 36 and most people tells me I look 30, yet, the software said 47.

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NicoJuicy
This could be an API on top of Face ++ ( which also predicts the age ;) )

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azinman2
Well this is depressing... constantly told me older than I actually am.

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pmelendez
I love this.. it says that I look 7 years younger! :D

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csomar
Without glasses: 22 With glasses: 27 real age: 24

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ChrisArgyle
Glasses seem to throw it off. Between 3 pics it guessed 33, 31 and 36. I'm 34.

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eridal
it's accurate .. I'd say 90% correct

I have also tried with photos of younger cousins and grandmother, with very
close results

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rodrigoavie
I tried my picture and it told me I looked 41.

I am 21. Geez

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comboy
Ray Kurzweil current photo - 39 (actual age 67). Damn, those meds are working
(no sarcasm here, I think the overall accuracy of this tool is stunning).

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dgabriel
No one I know who is younger than 50 looks like Ray Kurzweil...

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Zekio
darn it doubled my age no matter what photo i used, oh well guess i gotta get
used to being 42 then.

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rip747
taking your own photo doesn't seem to work on Android.

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matthuggins
Worked for me on the nexus 5.

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jorgeleo
very flattering

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michaelochurch
It got the picture of me and my cats almost spot-on: 32. Since I was older
than 31 1/2 at the time, I'm going to call that a hit. I attribute that to the
cats.

I think I win for maximum error, though. On a picture of Jeanne Calment on her
122nd birthday, it guessed 43. Off by 79 years.

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Dewie3
Yeah... not gonna go down that road.

