Do you ever notice how pets tend to look like their owners? Have you ever taken a selfie and wondered, “is there a dog on Petfinder making a similarly funny face?”
Doggelganger answers both of those questions.
Simply upload a selfie to our app that captures a moment you enjoy. Then, we look through our database of dogs to find one that matches your selfie’s ~vibe.
The best thing about a man is his dog. – Old french proverb
We’ll take your good side, and use it to find your better half.
We use an AI model to summarize your selfies into “embeddings”.
[dinov2 w registers] –> [image of embedding]
We train a cross-encoder to transform selfie embeddings into corresponding dog embeddings.
[cross-encoder architecture]
When you choose an image in the app, we take that image, make it into an embedding, use the cross-encoder to turn it into a corresponding “dog embedding”, then do a similarity search in our database.
[full architecture diagram]
And that’s how it works!!!
Right now we source our dogs from Petfinder. Although they claim to offer API keys, we’ve never been able to get one. And we’ve tried many times :(. So, right now, we’re scraping about 50,000 dogs from their site roughly once a week (trying to minimize our load).
If there’s some other pet database you’d like to add, contact us!!!
Also Petfinder, if you’re reading this: please give us an API key instead. We’d love to do this the official way.
github.com/dan-jacobson/doggelganger
Let us get in touch!
TL;DR: We never store your pictures or selifes.
If you "share" your doggelganger with a friend, we note that, and give the AI a gold star, but we still never store your picture.
We never store pictures themselves. We throw them away as soon as we have a match. We do store when you “share” a match.
We also store basic stuff about the app: how often it crashes, what parts people click on, how many folks actually open the Petfinder link, etc.
Want to see more about the details? See our full privacy page with more details, though still written in plain english.