Most of Microsoft's experimental iPhone apps, no matter how bizarre or niche, serve some kind of productivity need like meeting scheduling - something that solves a problem for somebody, somewhere.
Not so with Microsoft Selfie, a new iPhone-only app out of the company's Microsoft Garage skunkworks. There also appears to be a web version, but I couldn't get it to work.
Microsoft Selfie does exactly what it says on the label: It's an app, like a million others, that lets you take a selfie and then adjust the lighting, contrast, and visual filters.
That's it.
In the Apple App Store description, Microsoft promises that it has killer features like "noise reduction, intelligent enhancement, automatic exposure, and color theme." It also promises that it takes things like age, gender, and lightning into account when running auto image recognition.
In practice, it looks and feels almost exactly like using any other lightweight photo editing app.
I gave Microsoft Selfie a shot. Check it out.
Before:
Matt Weinberger/Business Insider
My ugly mug.
And after it automatically applied some of that promised intelligent enhancement:
Screenshot/Business Insider
My ugly mug, post-image enhancement.
In fairness, it's not totally out of left field for Microsoft. It's been using its Project Oxford machine learning technology to analyze and identify images in fun viral sites like this year's "How-Old.net." At a guess, Microsoft Selfie is probably using very similar technology, meaning it'll hypothetically get better at image recognition over time.