Google has announced an exciting new feature for its Arts and Culture app: the ability to search through thousands of paintings to find a look-alike for your pet. The company says its “Pet Portraits” feature will let you take a picture of a dog, cat, fish, bird, reptile, horse, or rabbit, and have a machine learning algorithm find pieces of art that feature a similar-looking animal. The process only takes a few seconds, and as a bonus you’ll be able to tap on the pieces of artwork to learn more about them. You can even save a video slideshow of your results.
I tried out Pet Portraits on my cat, Aslan, and the results were mixed — while the app was able to generate a beautiful (okay, mostly tan) color palette based on his fur, most of the art doppelgängers (as Google puts it) didn’t end up looking much like him at all.
It also missed the most obvious look-alike for my boy (though in its defense I don’t think Google knows my cat’s name).