Microsoft Fetch iPhone App Uses Ruff Machine Learning To ID Your Dog’s Breed

Let’s get this out of the way first: Fetch, which comes by way of the Microsoft Garage app skunkworks, is currently only available for the iOS platform. Although we’re certain that users that are sticking with Microsoft’s struggling Windows Phone efforts wish that they were thrown a bone, it wasn’t mean to be. That being said, iPhone users can download the app and snap pictures of their beloved pooch to gauge the accuracy of Microsoft’s dog-identifying algorithms.

In my case, I pointed my iPhone’s camera at our family pooch, Chandler. As you can clearly see, Chandler is a sweet, 5-year-old Miniature Schnauzer. Fetch correctly identified Chandler’s breed, citing that it was 95 percent certain of its accuracy.

“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,” explained 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.”

Fetch will also accept images of humans and give its best interpretation of what dog that person represents. “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.”

We decided to have a little fun and input a picture of our favorite “dog”, the one and only Snoop Dogg, to which we were presented with:

Better luck next time, Fetch!