Microsoft Garage Works has created Fetch!, a very clever facial recognition app and a separate an online generator called “What is your dog?”, which allows users to determine dog breeds just by uploading a photo. What makes all of this really fun that submissions are not just limited to dogs. Cats, people and even superheroes can be identified as a dog in what they call “fun mode”. Mitch Goldberg, a development director at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, U.K. explained how it works.
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. …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.
images via Fetch
