Now you can not only look at pictures, but also "feel" them. "Alice AI" from Yandex has an experimental function that describes the smell from a photograph. The company emphasizes that this is the first such functionality among neural networks.
It works simply: you upload a photo and the neural network tries to determine what it "smells" like. And it's not just about specific objects, but also about the atmosphere. A country house turns into "summer, grass and homemade pastries", and an office turns into "air conditioning, paper and thoughts of a break".
It is based on the analysis of visual details: colors, textures, objects and the general context of the scene. Based on them, Alice selects associations and forms a description, conveying the smell through text.
The function is available in a limited beta test format from April 1 to April 3. You can try it in the Alice AI applications, the web version, Yandex Browser and Search with Alice.
So far, this looks like an experiment, but the direction is obvious: neural networks are gradually going beyond the usual perception and starting to work with what was previously considered exclusively human experience.
