Microsoft's new CaptionBot site tries to describe what's in a photo

Microsoft's latest effort to promote its image recognition tools quietly launched during Build 2016. It's called Captionbot, and it's a website that lets people upload a photo to see if the bot can accurately describe what's being depicted in the image.

The website comes from Microsoft Cognitive Services, the company's division that created the APIs that are used for the previously launched HowOld.net or TwinorNot.com websites. In this case, the Captionbot site uses Microsoft's Computer Vision, Emotion and Bing Image APIs to come up with the captions for the uploaded photos.

How accurate is it? At the moment, it looks like some photos and images are getting solid captions, while others are highly innacurate, and unintentionally funny. Sometimes the site cannot come up with a caption at all. As with many of Microsoft's other cloud-based services, the CaptionBot site is designed to learn with more experience and as such the captions will become more accurate over time.

Check out the Captionbot.ai site