Tably is an AI Camera App That Reveals Your Cat’s Mood

Think you have a good pulse on how your cat is feeling? Tably is a new AI-powered app that can help confirm whether your suspicions are correct. Simply use your smartphone camera to take a picture of your feline friend and the app will use machine learning to decode its mood.

Sylvester.AI, the company behind the app, writes that Tably is based on the Feline Grimace Scale, a proven tool used by scientists to determine pain in animals based on facial expressions. A scientist can score expressions both in real-time or from photographs based on the presence or prominence of things like whisker changes, ear positions, and more.

The developers at Sylvester.AI realized that this type of objective scoring is a perfect use case for machine learning, and that’s how Tably was born.

“[The Feline Grimace Scale is] proven to help determine how much pain a cat is feeling, taking into account five facial cues: ear position, orbital tightening, muzzle tension, whisker position and head position,” the company states. “The Feline Grimace Scale has proven helpful to veterinarians trying to understand feline pain. Because it uses visual markers it’s the perfect tool to integrate into our artificial intelligence platform.”

Tably is the perfect tool for cat owners and veterinarians alike because of how guarded cats can be with their true feelings.

“Cats are skilled at hiding their pain, leading many cat owners to misinterpret their cats’ feelings. Our AI helps eliminate this error.”

For best results, you’ll need to make sure you capture a clean, well-lit photograph of your cat’s face in full view.

When you do provide sufficiently high-quality photos, the app’s conclusions should be very accurate.

“With a high quality and full face front image of the cat, the accuracy is 97 percent [with adults cats of most breeds], which we are tremendously happy with,” Tably senior product manager Michelle Priest tells Wired.

Tably is currently in open beta, and you can join to start deciphering your cat’s mood by signing up on the Sylvester.AI website. The app will be available for both iOS and Android when it’s officially launched, though there’s no word yet on when that will be. The company is also planning to roll out the technology for other animals as well once Tably is established with cat owners.