A new website called ImageIdentify.com has been launched by Wolfram Alpha, and it is able to identify almost any image that is thrown at it.
The new tool is the latest of many launched by the artificial intelligence company, with one such tool allowing users to ask what planes are flying overhead, after which Wolfram will pull information from a huge database of flights to try and find your answer.
"Now I'm excited to be able to say that we've reached a milestone: there's finally a function called ImageIdentify built into the Wolfram Language that lets you ask, "What is this a picture of?" — and get an answer ... It's a nice practical example of artificial intelligence. But to me what's more important is that we've reached the point where we can integrate this kind of 'AI operation' right into the Wolfram Language — to use as a new, powerful building block for knowledge-based programming," said the company in a blog post.
Of course, the new tool doesn't work all the time, however, when it does make a mistake, most of the time it seems as though it's a pretty human-like mistake. The tool mostly has trouble identifying particular products, but most images of things found in nature the tool has no trouble with. Not only that, but as more people use the tool, it will get better, essentially "learning" from its mistakes.
In order to create the system, Wolfram says that it was fed millions of photos so that it could learn how to identify them. It is now capable of recognizing around 10,000 common objects and is learning more as time goes on.
Image recognition is becoming an increasingly useful and popular tool. Recently, Flickr unveiled a new tool that attempts to identify images in order to sort a user's image library. Microsoft also recently unveiled a website designed to identify roughly how old someone is. The tool will join the likes of Google Goggles and Amazon's Firefly, but ImageIdentify is obviously not built to sell products.
ImageIdentify is also available to developers who want to create apps and APIs to tap into the feature using Wolfram's language.
"And if one had lots of photographs, one could immediately write a Wolfram Language program that, for example, gave statistics on the different kinds of animals, or planes, or devices, or whatever, that appear in the photographs," continued Wolfram.
Image recognition technology itself is only set to get better, and there is no limit to the potential that the tech could bring.
