Google's New Program 'AutoDraw' Will Help Your Drawings Suck Less

Are you terrible at drawing? Some people (myself included) struggle with drawing the most basic sketches. A dog looks like a mutated pig, and a stick figure has an insanely curved back. It happens, and those are just the struggles of drawing with a paper and pencil. Google is launching a new program to help those artistically-deficit individuals. AutoDraw uses machine learning to match your doodles with professional works in order to clean up a sketch.

How AutoDraw works

Simply pull up AutoDraw on your phone, tablet, or desktop computer and start sketching. Keep drawing what you think is your best attempt at a birthday cake or a car or a cat.

As you draw, image suggestions will appear above the drawing pad. These images come courtesy of a talented artist community. They submit their simple drawings to Google, the AutoDraw group sifts through them, and then those drawings become available. Find the image that most closely resembles what you want for the project, and add it to your work. If you need to freehand something like background illustrations, you can switch off the auto-draw suggestions.

Does the app promise to give you Disney-style artistry? No. However, it's perfect if you need to make a quick flyer or birthday card. It's also great for doodling on the go or keeping yourself entertained throughout the day.

"We hope AutoDraw will help make drawing and creating a little more accessible and fun for everyone," said the Google AI Experiments team.

The program uses the same AI algorithms as Google's QuickDraw challenge. In the game, players see if the program's neural network can correctly identify random doodles in just 20 seconds. During its search for the right drawing, the neural network will compare your sketching in real time to what others have done. It also verbally explains each guess so that players can tailor and adjust their drawings to help out the AI. Both AutoDraw and QuickDraw help train Google's ever expanding neural network.

For more information or to test AutoDraw out for yourself, check out the Google AI Experiments lab here.

[Featured Image Source: Google Developers/YouTube]

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