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Microsoft

Microsoft offends and compliments tens of thousands with age-guessing app

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By Nesh Pillay, Reporter

May 1, 2015 | 2 min read

Microsoft has released an app that uses an algorithm to guess the sex and age of people based on their pictures.

The experiment was meant to draw in about 50 respondents, but within hours, had been tested more than 35,000 times.

“We monitored our real time analytics dashboard to track usage and, within a few minutes, the number of people using the site vastly exceeded the number of people we had sent our email to,” Microsoft revealed in a blogpost. “We watched the usage quickly spread across continents.”

The accuracy of the program varies – some claim it is accurate within a year, though multiple trials at the Drum New York office have found that generally overestimates age. The results on the same picture also tend to vary between tries.

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