Google announces 3 AI-powered photography apps, wants you to pose for selfie

Google's Pixel phones have shown that the company is big on AI and photography. Now Google has launched three new apps that use AI to make photography more fun. The apps are called Storyboard, Selfissimo and Scrubbies. Of the three,  the Storyboard is only available for Android phones whereas the Scrubbies is only for the iPhones. The Selfissimo, which is also the most fun app of the three, is available for both Android devices and iPhones.

The Storyboard allows a user to capture a sequence of images showing some action -- imagine a person skating and jumping -- and then turn those photos into a comic strip. The Selfissimo allows you to pose in front of the phone and then automatically click a selfie each time you change the pose. The Scrubbies is a video app that allows a user to change the video playback speed and create loops. The three apps were announced through a post on Google's Research Blog.

"Today, we're launching the first installment of a series of photography appsperiments: usable and useful mobile photography experiences built on experimental technology," a Google spokesperson noted on the blog. "They rely on object recognition, person segmentation, stylization algorithms, efficient image encoding and decoding technologies, and perhaps most importantly, fun."

Of the three apps, the most fun seems to be the Selfissimo. "Selfissimo! is an automated selfie photographer that snaps a stylish black and white photo each time you pose. Tap the screen to start a photoshoot. The app encourages you to pose and captures a photo whenever you stop moving," writes the Google spokesperson.

Given that these are experimental apps, they have limited functionality and are definitely not going to appeal to everyone. Also, keep in mind that these apps use a lot of processing power for AI calculations so they will probably run better only on high-end phones. But these are interesting apps  and if they get good reception it is even possible that they may become permanent part of Android camera app in future.

Increasingly, Google is focussing on computational and AI-driven photography in Android, and in its own Pixel phones. The recently launched, Pixel 2 and the Pixel 2 XL phones use AI and machine learning to offer consumers a very neat portrait mode, which identifies the outlines of people and then blurs the background. Earlier in Pixel and Nexus phones the company used AI to enable HDR+ mode that captures brilliant dynamic range in photos clicked with those phones and processes the images to ensure they have low noise and richer colours.