Earlier this year, Microsoft unveiled a tool that could guess your age from a single photograph. Now, it wants to guess how you’re feeling too. It might not get the answer right—but it is kinda fun.
Announced at Microsoft’sFuture Decoded conference in the UK, the software will take any photograph you hand it, identify the faces, and then give each one a score on a series of different emotions. It attempts to quantify you on metrics for anger, contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise. You can try a demo version of the software out here.
When we showed it this image, which Microsoft thinks is a 33-year-old, the software gave the scores that we’ve copied below.
“Anger”: 0.00245399633
“Contempt”: 0.0002230109
“Disgust”: 0.00170701393
“Fear”: 0.008228042
“Happiness”: 0.04340501
“Neutral”: 0.312666059
“Sadness”: 0.00111119472
“Surprise”: 0.6302057
Seems about right. Obviously, though, it won’t get the right answers all the time. The software itself is based on machine learning, where a large database of images tagged with emotions is used to teach software how to identify certain emotions in other, fresh images.
The new software is part of a larger update of what Microsoft is calling the Project Oxford Face API. It contains a series of software tools—including image and speech recognition tools, as well as smart spell-checking technology—that developers are able to use free of charge.
But anyway. Now it’s time for you to test out the software with silly images from the internet. Right?
[Microsoft via Business Insider]