Microsoft Wants You To Take Pretty Selfies -- With Your iPhone

Microsoft Selfie promises to tweak your pics for age, gender, skin tone and lighting.

Remember when Microsoft released that age-guessing tool?

Microsoft

Well, the company is once again bringing its machine learning techniques and algorithms to bear on our photos, but this time it's using them to do something that's actually useful: making selfies look better.

"Microsoft Selfie" is an iOS app that promises to subtly optimize selfies, calibrating them for things like "age, gender, skin tone and lighting." It's not exactly a novel concept — Chinese smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi offers a similar feature. But it is another example of Microsoft extending its reach beyond Windows as it course corrects for our increasingly mobile world.

This isn't Microsoft's first selfie app. Indeed, Microsoft Selfie appears to be a stripped down version of the Windows Phone app Lumia Selfie rejiggered for iOS. That said, with Microsoft's share of the mobile market at a piddling 1.7%, the company has a far better shot of getting some traction for its new selfie app on the iPhone than it does on devices running its own mobile OS.