Hell, doesn’t really work in temperate zones ether to be honest. It gets common house/yard plants well but if you go into actual wild-ish areas it will give you 5 different answers from five different angles of the same plant.
I downloaded google lense a while back to identify a mushroom. It was pretty and I was curious. After installing and taking the picture it replied… “Mushroom.”
The second image said false widow’s death wish or something metal as hell.
Yah, mushrooms are not that hard to identify if you know what to look for. I worry people who do not know what to look for will be far too confident with such an imperfect tool.
Especially with the growth of demand for foraged mushrooms in restaurants and supermarkets. It’s big money, and I have no doubt some “enterprising” people are going to get people hurt by trusting these tools too much.
“Haha Google says this is safe, I’ll try it”
“Why is my entire skin numb”
Same here for the southern hemisphere. Google lens has no clue.
How does Plantnet fare in tropics?
I mean its just a matter of total available data points. The more images people take and upload, the more material they have to train their models. And obviously there will be way less people running around the tropics taking pictures.
It’s honestly way more about plant diversity. There are a million different plants in like a ten square mile area that all look exactly like an aloe and are related. The only way to differentiate them is by hyper obscure differences like their root structure and what their sap consists of.
You don’t even need to be in the proper tropics. Walk around San Diego with a plant id app and watch it spit out a different name for the same palm tree over and over because there are actually hundreds of varietals of palm with similar extremely complex identification processes. Some with toxic fruit and some with edible fruit that look the same.
I mean for those plants the model should be trained to spit out the next highest common denominator / family instead of the specific species. I would love to get a reply like “this could be any of the following species” instead of “im 23.232% sure that its this species”
From my experience it’s quite good in the Caribbean and it’s getting better.
