Sight & Sound Lab
Computers have no eyes and no ears. They have numbers. Let's see what that looks like.
Draw something
A cat, a house, a sun. Big and simple works best. Then ask the computer what it sees.
Did it get it right?
This computer learned from millions of photos, not doodles. Thin black lines on white look like nothing it has seen. Add more detail: eyes, a tail, some shading, then ask again.
The computer never sees your drawing. It sees this. Every picture becomes a grid of numbers first.
Your drawing squeezed to 28 by 28 squares. 0 = white, 9 = black. That is 784 numbers.
The computer looks for places where the numbers change fast. Those are edges. Shapes are made of edges.
Same 784 numbers, coloured. Dark blocks matter, light blocks are ignored. This is all it has to guess from.
…or point the camera
A small robot brain called MobileNet lives inside this page. It knows 1000 kinds of things. Show it a cup, a shoe, a banana.
Make a sound
Tap the microphone and talk, clap or hum. The wobbly line is your sound turned into numbers, thousands every second.
How sound becomes words
Some of the numbers right now (the first 40 of 2048 in this slice, … samples a second):
The word guesser is your browser's own. Language set to en-GB. It works better when you speak clearly and close to the mic.