Google Photos is among the applications that have been receiving a series of updates over the past couple of months, and the search giant seems to have quietly slipped another feature into the service that automatically creates slideshows of your dogs and cats. A sample slideshow of a dog has been shared by a Reddit user, who revealed that Google just made the so-called “Doggie movie” from their gallery. To add more life to the slideshow, Google Photos also included some background music into the mix, in this case, The Blue Danube Waltz by the Austrian composer Johann Strauss II, performed primarily with dog barks.
It remains unclear, however, whether the feature is now available to all Google Photos users since the Mountain View-based company has yet to announce the new tool. It is also not clear how many users have already gotten their hands on the new functionality or in which countries is the tool now available. It is possible that Google is trying out the new feature among a small sample of users, though it remains to be seen how long the company takes to roll it out on a global level in that case.
Google Photos is one of many artificial intelligence-powered apps made by Google, courtesy of machine learning capabilities that the search giant has been developing in recent years. This May, Google Photos received the “Suggestive Sharing” feature which lets users automatically share photos taken with their designated contacts, which will be recommended by Google’s AI service. Google’s machine learning API also started recognizing stuff in videos recently. For instance, Google demonstrated during its cloud conference in March that its machine learning technology can already recognize a tiger in a video with an accuracy of over 90 percent. The technology relies on Tensor Flow and other deep-learning solutions, the company previously revealed. It is not clear whether the same models are now being used for the new feature found in Google Photos. On top of recognizing certain subjects in a video, machine learning has also enabled Google Photos to place a greater emphasis on facial recognition in recent times.