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Google Photos Now Recognizes Your Pets (techcrunch.com)
Today, Google is introducing an easier way to aggregate your pet photos in its Photos app -- by allowing you to group all your pet's photos in one place, right beside the people Google Photos organized using facial recognition. TechCrunch reports: This is an improvement over typing in "dog," or another generalized term, because the app will now only group together photos of an individual pet together, instead of returning all photos you've captured with a "dog" in them. And like the face grouping feature, you can label the pet by name to more easily pull up their photos in the app, or create albums, movies or photo books using their pictures. In addition, Google Photos lets you type in an animal's breed to search for photos of pets, and it lets you search for photos using the dog and cat emojis. The company also earlier this year introduced a feature that would create a mini-movie starring your pet, but you can opt to make one yourself by manually selecting photos then choosing from a half-dozen tracks to accompany the movie, says Google.
It is likely using the same codebase that is used to recognize individual people and could likely be expanded to other interesting research like recognizing individual birds in the wild.
As far as the pet angle, there are plenty of people that enjoy this kind of work and this kind of work is sadly increasing with things like pet pedicures and pet massages and things even more bizarre. There is a ton of money to be made from people who feed their dogs better than half the world's human population.