Fetch! is the latest Microsoft Garage project, now available on iOS. Fetch! is an iPhone app that identifies dog breeds from photos from your iPhone camera, photo collection or dog photos you find online through Bing. Fetch! finds detailed information about each dog breed and allows you to share results on Facebook and Twitter. Fetch! is available for free in the Apple App Store or on the web at What-Dog.net.
Fetch! is the latest Project Oxford-inspired project like HowOld.net, TwinsOrNot.net, MyMoustache.net and Mimicker Alarm. Fetch! not only identifies photos of dogs, but you can also use photos of your friends to disguise them as dog breeds and Fetch will try to guess what dog breed they are. Fetch! is another example of how Project Oxford works with Microsoft’s powerful machine learning technology to find interesting information on all types of photos.
Mitch Goldberg, a development director at Microsoft Research, built the Fetch! app with his team Cambridge, UK. Goldberg explains the process of creating Fetch!:
“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. 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.”
If Fetch! can’t identify the dog breed, it will give you a percentage of the closest likely dog breed. If you tap the percentage icon, the app will show the top five likely breeds that the dog breed might be; tapping the arrow in the lower-right hand corner will show you more information about each dog breed.
If you use a photo that is not a dog, Fetch! will tell you so. If you use a photo of an orange, Fetch! may give you a message like “No dogs found!” Fetch! will do its best to guess what the object is; every picture you submit will get a different result. Goldberg’s team also created a website, What-Dog.net, that has photos of dogs that you can experiment with, find information about various dog breeds, submit your own dog photos, and share them on What-Dog.net.
Download Fetch! for your iPhone.
