Google’s Pet Portraits feature compares your furry friends to animals in famous artworks
Find Fido’s framed doppelgänger
Reckon your pet is a work of art? Check your perception with Google’s Pet Portraits. Pap a snap of your pooch or puss, upload it to the big G’s Arts & Culture app and let AI do the rest. It’ll analyse your furry friend’s face and compare it to creatures featured in famous artworks around the world.
It’s not limited to household animals, either. Besides dogs and cats, Google reckons the feature can recognise fish, birds, horses, rabbits and reptiles – so you can finally discover whether your lizard has a painted lookalike.
Keen to compare your companion? It’s as easy as downloading Google’s Arts & Culture app and tapping the camera button. You can either snap a fresh portrait of your pet or select an existing candid from your library. Its machine learning algorithm will then assess Mr Fluffy’s mug against its catalogue of works from various museums and galleries.
It’s the animal equivalent of Google’s Art Selfie feature, which introduced a similar comparative tool for human faces a few years ago. Like Art Selfie, the Pet Portrait setting serves up a range of results which it thinks are similar to the image you submitted. And, like Art Selfie, it does so with pretty mixed success. At best, the resemblance between beast and picture is distant. At worst…it compared a Yorkshire Terrier to a turtle hatchling.
Still, it’s a fun way to explore art, which is really the whole point of the app experience. You can tap on the suggested picture to learn more about its back story, including who made it, when it was created and where the real one is on display. You can also zoom in on the work and even view it in augmented reality for a virtual gallery experience.
And if your pet is impressed with their twin, they can save the side-by-side snap to share on their Insta feed. Which is sure to get paws of approval from the rest of their pack. Fido ready to pose? The Google Arts & Culture app is free to download for iOS and Android.
Chris Rowlands
Freelance contributor 
