Microsoft launches Sprinkles, a silly camera app powered by machine learning

Microsoft is getting into the fun camera app game with a new iOS application called Sprinkles, which has now earned a featured spot in the New apps we love section of the App Store. The gist withSprinkles, clearly aimed at a teen audience, is to offer a varietyof traditional photo decorating tools like stickers, emoji and captions, but leverages Microsofts machine learning and A.I. capabilities to do things like detect faces, determine the photo subjects age and emotion, figure out your celebrity look-a-like, suggest captions,and more.

These tools have been put to use before in other consumer-facing web projects from Microsoft, like CelebsLike.me, which shows your celebrity doppelgngers, for example, or How-Old.net, a site from Microsofts machine-learning team that tries to guess your age.

With Sprinkles, these sorts of tools are integrated into a new photo-editing experience instead, where Microsoft hopes to cater to the same crowd thats obsessed with Snapchats flower crowns and puppy faces.

The new app leverages facial recognition techniques toproperly overlays decorations like hats ormustaches, as well as its guesses about the subjects age and celeb look-a-likes. It uses object recognition to understand whats in the photo, or it can tell if youre smiling, and then suggests relevant captions. (For example, a scowlingface photo prompted the caption turn that frown upside down.)

And it can suggest captions and stickers based on factors like time or location where the photo was taken. (E.g. its caption may includeMonday jokes for photos snapped on a Monday.)

You can swipe through its various suggestions including props, caption ideas, age suggestions, and more to pick those you like, or you can manually decorate your photos with stickers from the web, emoji (sourced from EmojiOne), or your own text.

Naturally, the resulting image can be saved or shared with friends, however you choose, including over messaging, Facebook, Twitter, email and more.

This is not Microsofts first attempt withiOS camera apps, to be clear. The company had previously released Microsoft Selfie, a competitor of sorts to FaceTune, which helps you smooth out your selfie photos; and it introduced Microsoft Pix, an A.I.-powered alternative to the default camera app that enhances photos.

However, Sprinkles is the first to really aim young,with an app thats a bitderivative in terms of its inspiration (decorate your photos!), but also cleverly aggregates a lot of the silly but fun technology Microsoft before showcased only in its standalone side projects. Sprinkles similarly feels like just another side project thats meant to act as a demonstration of its technology. (But it was also released on April 1st, soApril Fools to anyone taking it seriously?)

The app is a free download on the iTunes App Store.

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