A new artificial intelligence app from Microsoft will analyze an image you upload of your dog and will probably guess the correct breed (or breeds in the case of mixed breed pups!)
What-dog.net is the site which is also available as an iOS app called Fetch!
Using your iPhone camera or photo library, it can identify and classify dogs by breeds and tell you what kind of human personality fits best with specific breeds. The app will even take an analytical guess as to what breed of dog best fits your photo!
[Related: Traveling for the Holidays? Use Tech to Give Your Pet More Than a Kennel Stay]
“There was an interest in creating a framework that would allow you to take a domain–in our case, dogs–and recognize numerous classes, such as breeds. We were interested in enabling an app to allow you to make object recognition extraordinary, fun, and surprising,†says Mitch Goldberg, a development director at Microsoft Research. “We wanted to bring artificial intelligence to the canine world. We wanted to show that object recognition is something anyone could understand and interact with.â€
“If you want to take photos of dogs, it will tell you what dog breed it is, if it’s one of our supported breeds,†Goldberg says. “If I choose to take a photograph of a flower, it’ll say, ‘No dogs found! Hmmm… This looks more like…flower?’ But if you take a picture of a person, it’ll kick into its hidden fun mode. And in a playful way, it’ll communicate to you not only what type of dog it thinks you are, but also why. It’s fun to see if the app knows it’s not a dog. A lot of the time, it’ll tell you what that image is. When there’s not a dog, you still want to use it.â€