Emojis IRL: find them using machine learning

Editor’s Note: AI is behind many of Google’s products and is a big priority for us as a company (more about that at Google I/O next week). Before the festivities commence, we’re sharing how AI already affects your life in ways you might not know, and how people from all over the world have used AI to build their own technology. First, let’s play a game.

Emojis have become a language all their own, so much so that we use them every day to communicate in texts and emails. These emojis are obviously modeled after their real world counterparts, which got us thinking: can we use the power of our phones to find the real world versions of the emojis we use every day?

Introducing Emoji Scavenger Hunt ?️‍♀️, powered by Tensorflow.js—TensorFlow’s open-source framework for machine learning with JavaScript. It works like this: the game will show you an emoji, and you have to find its real world version before time expires. While you search, the neural network will try and guess what it’s seeing—proof that machine learning can be used for more than serious applications. Sometimes, you’re just on the hunt for a ?, and machine learning can help.

Emoji Scavenger Hunt

Play for yourself at g.co/EmojiScavengerHunt. How many emojis ??? can you find ? ?