Microsoft has used artificial intelligence to release apps that can determine how old people are, whether two people are twins and even the length of a person’s mustache. Next up: dog breeds.
In the latest display of the power of deep neural networks — machine learning systems that mimic the structure of the human brain — the Microsoft Garage incubation lab, this morning released an iPhone app and web app called “Fetch!”, which identifies the breed of a dog based on a picture. Like the previous apps and services in the series, it’s powered by Microsoft’s Project Oxford artificial intelligence platform.
“We wanted to bring artificial intelligence to the canine world,” said Mitch Goldberg, a Microsoft Research development director who leads the Cambridge, U.K-based team that developed the Fetch! apps and experience, in a Microsoft article on the project. “We wanted to show that object recognition is something anyone could understand and interact with.”
The breed-identification technology was first shown at a Microsoft Research event two years ago and has evolved in the time since to a consumer-friendly app, with some extra features. In addition to identifying the breed of dog within a certain degree of certainty, for example, the app can take an “informed guess” as to what type of breed a person most resembles.
By: Todd Bishop