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Microsoft’s new Fetch app can identify breeds from photos of dogs

“We wanted to show that object recognition is something anyone could understand and interact with”, said a Microsoft Research development director and project leader Mitch Goldberg in a blog post.

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Microsoft’s experimental lab Garage has today launched Fetch!, an app that’s powered by the company’s Project Oxford AI platform and machine learning system that can determine the breed of a canine from a photo on your phone’s camera roll or a new snap.

The app also helps you identify and classify dogs by breed. It’s also aware of its own limitations – if it can’t conclusively say what breed the dog is, the app will generate the five most likely answers, giving each a percentage of certainty.

What-Dog.net naturally comes from the same folks who launched How-Old.net, a web app that would guess how old you are based on a photo, a few months ago.

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We tried the app with some of the Channel 13 anchors. You play with What-Dog.net, the latest silly viral sensation from Microsoft Garage. Essentially, Fetch! learns to identify dog breeds by processing loads of dog photos, eventually picking up on the finer points of what distinguishes one breed from the next. Just for fun we include a mode that lets you find out what dog breeds you and your friends are. Fetch! will do its best to guess what the object is; every picture you submit will get a different result.

Fetch! Microsoft's latest artificial-intelligence trick is an app to identify dog breeds