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mickeyp
Interesting, but I question its utility, particularly if a name is ambiguous - like "Alex". Also, I tried it with my sister's name, Nanna, and it returned "null." Apparently she's neuter.
chintan
Neat!

It would be nice to get some sort of "confidence level" - http://api.genderize.io/?name=jackie

Stromgren
A "confidence level" will now be recieved :)
ds9
On my first try I got an erroneous result on a non-Anglo name: http://api.genderize.io/?name=krishna returned "male". In fact god names are unisex; I've met a female Krishna.

Edit: and "null" on Vishnu. I didn't see on the page whether this is supposed to extend beyond Anglo-American culture.

And "kyle" came up "male", tho I can report a female Kyle. Whoever is populating the database may be underestimating gender/naming trends.

gales
I wonder what dataset is being used behind the scenes. Tried "Roberta" and it returned "null".
xutopia
How does that site work? It mentions nothing about pricing?
nollidge
Other commenters are already demonstrating that the error rate is way too high to be useful. If you need a user's gender (and you probably don't), just ask them.
fiatmoney
Also helpful is:

https://github.com/bmuller/sexmachine

which uses a multilingual dictionary, that accounts for names that cross gender in different countries.

camtarn
The underlying dictionary for this, gender/nam_dict by Jorg Michael, is an awesome piece of work: it has entries for each name, its gender (or genders), and how popular that name is in each country where it's used (especially useful for names which are female in one country but male in another country, but where they're much more popular in the former than the latter).

It's a bit of an odd file format but it's fairly straight forward to build something which will read it into the language of your choice.

http://www.autohotkey.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=22000

davidu
Pro tip: Don't try to be "too smart" or clever when talking to your users.

Being wrong here is so much more tacky than either asking for gender if you need it, or just writing in a gender neutral way.

"I'm sorry we were wrong, but our computer determined you have a girl's name. If you change your name, it'll work now."

fournm
And in more cases than people seem to think, you really don't need it.
twerquie
I suspect this is more for data analysis than it is for user-facing features.

I hope.

ddoolin
This is far more useful for advertising, especially when trying to build user segments. If you have the gender from the user directly entering it somewhere along the line, great. If not, this comes in.
tommorris
Yes. Don't attempt to infer gender from names.

Mostly, you don't need it. You'll often get it wrong. You may end up pissing off transgender people. Unless you are running a dating site (in which case, you should actually get people to specify which gender(s) they are—and, yes, people will want options beyond male and female) there is no need for it.

If you want to know my gender, ask. Don't infer.

NoPiece
For people interested in other tools, there is a command line gender verification tool and database:

http://www.autohotkey.com/board/topic/20260-gender-verificat...

and a Ruby gam that is built on the above data:

https://github.com/bmuller/sexmachine

rmc
A "command line gender verification tool"? So it'll verify my gender based from the command line? :P
alexhawdon
I ran it...

....I....I.... just want to be alone for a bit.

rajington 

  http://api.genderize.io/?name=jessie
  {"jessie":"male"}

  irb(main):005:0> d.get_gender("Jessie")
  => :female
Not only is it better, it handles cases like androgynous and "mostly male"

BRB while I turn this into a web api

rajington
Done https://github.com/rajington/genderizer

and Done

http://murmuring-depths-3923.herokuapp.com/?name=jessie

http://murmuring-depths-3923.herokuapp.com/?name[0]=peter&na...

Compared to:

http://api.genderize.io/?name=jessie

http://api.genderize.io/?name[0]=peter&name[1]=lois&name[2]=...

I just wanted to learn basic Sinatra, but I might try to do the POST operations too.

rossriley
There's a PECL extension for PHP that claims to provide this too: http://php.net/gender

Not tested it on too many challenging tasks but it seems to work well too.

appsappsapps
First two tries:

  ~ % curl "http://api.genderize.io?name=pat"
  {"pat":null}%
Shouldn't that be "unisex"?

  ~ % curl "http://api.genderize.io?name=patricia"
  {"patricia":null}%
Hm...
sksksk
It seems to be broken, everything is returning male (or null)

    curl http://api.genderize.io?name=joe
    {"joe":"male"}

    curl http://api.genderize.io?name=jo
    {"jo":"male"}

    curl http://api.genderize.io?name=jamie
    {"jamie":"male"}

    curl http://api.genderize.io?name=jaime
    {"jaime":"male"}

    curl http://api.genderize.io?name=joan
    {"joan":"male"}

    curl http://api.genderize.io?name=kelly
    {"kelly":"male"}

    curl http://api.genderize.io?name=lucy
    {"lucy":null}
kristopolous
It's intensely slow too. I just fed it top 10 female names of the 70s and 80s and it got about 30%. It's wrong, slow, and broken. Not a good start.
rajington 

  ab -n 100 -c 5 http://api.genderize.io/\?name\=Cameron
Total: 636 1373 157.7 1304 1664

  ab -n 100 -c 5 http://genderizer.herokuapp.com/\?name\=Cameron
Total: 77 141 70.1 115 383

Heroku's free tier, not nearly as overloaded right now, but still. Source here: https://github.com/rajington/genderizer

rajington
http://genderizer.herokuapp.com?name=joe

{"joe":"male"}

http://genderizer.herokuapp.com?name=jo

{"jo":"female"}

http://genderizer.herokuapp.com?name=jamie

{"jamie":"mostly_female"}

http://genderizer.herokuapp.com?name=jaime

{"jaime":"andy"}

http://genderizer.herokuapp.com?name=joan

{"joan":"female"}

http://genderizer.herokuapp.com?name=kelly

{"kelly":"mostly_female"}

http://genderizer.herokuapp.com?name=lucy

{"lucy":"female"}

BONUS: http://genderizer.herokuapp.com/?name=jaime&country=ireland

{"jaime":"male"}

Heroku's free tier, not nearly as overloaded right now, but still. Source here: https://github.com/rajington/genderizer

iamds
I haven't tried the api yet, but the example on the home page says that "Lois" is a female name - when in fact, in the 1930s it was quite a popular male name with about 70 boys born each year named lois. Checkout http://www.namemeababy.com to see the full stats.
brohee
Completely worthless without a national/ethnic hint.

E.g. "Jean" will be male if the first name of a French person, while likely female in the US.

geuis
As Elizabeth or Leslie are common male names in the UK but female in the US.

I appreciate the authors effort, but don't see much use.

weego
Elizabeth isn't used as a male name anywhere...
nateguchi
Never heard of a male "Elizabeth" here in the UK
azurelogic
It tells me that my daughter's name, Avery, is male, yet it is the 13th most popular name for baby girls right now. Someone needs an updated data set.
swengw
If you're interested in doing this yourself, the book associated with Python's Natural Language Toolkit has a pretty good introduction to identifying gender in the chapter on text classification [1].

[1] http://nltk.org/book/ch06.html

lotsofcows
Apparently I'm "null". I'll assume that's not an attempt to be deliberately offensive. :-)
tareqak
This sort of thing sounds like something Facebook would be very good at doing using Open Graph.
klous
I've thought about this before, you also should be able to get a somewhat accurate estimate of the median age of a group of attendees to an event based on the first names alone. See Baby Name Wizard Voyager tool for visualizations of first name occurences since 1900s: http://www.babynamewizard.com/voyager
ronaldx
I would be impressed by that!