Microsoft's Murphy Bot tries to guess which Euro 2016 team you're a fan of

The Euro 2016 football – or "soccer", for our American friends - championship is kicking off today and Microsoft is celebrating with Murphy, a bot that can tell who’s your favorite team just by looking at your face.

Murphy seems to be a new implementation of Microsoft’s Cognitive Services, machine-learning algorithms that can detect faces, identify people, guess feelings, guess ages and caption images. We’ve seen these implementations in various websites including How-old, CaptionBot, Twins or Not, and the Fetch app.

And now the company is adding a new website to that list, seemingly just in time for Euro 2016. The website, what-fan.net, also called Project Murphy, says it can identify whose fan you are just by looking at your face. In practice, Murphy, “the robot with imagination”, scans a picture you’ve uploaded and tries to guess which footballer you most look like. Then, based on that, it tells you which European national club you’re a fan of. Or not.

There’s also a My Story section on the website, where developers would normally explain how Murphy works and how other developers can take advantage of Microsoft’s Cognitive Services. However, right now that section is empty, suggesting the website wasn’t supposed to be live just yet.

You can give Murphy a try here and see if it guesses your football allegiance on its first go.

Thanks Walking Cat for the tip!