It’s a familiar problem for any designer: You’re walking down the street when you spot a glorious typeface in the wild–something that would be perfect for the project you’ve been working on. But you have no idea what the font’s name is.
Enter WhatTheFont, an app created by the typography company Monotype. The app originally launched in 2009, but has been updated to use machine learning to identify fonts in any picture you upload or take through the app. That means it can do a lot more than the original app’s font identifier, which Monotype’s director of research and development Sampo Kaasila says used “brute force” to match an image to one of 133,000 fonts. Now, the app uses a deep learning algorithm trained on 250 images per font–a total of 33 million images.
Now, the app is far better and faster at identifying connected, cursive fonts and finding multiple fonts in a single image. Kaasila says its accuracy is over 90% and errors are most common when the picture is poor quality or there’s a small set of characters. As more people use the algorithm, the better it will get.
If the font is 1 of 133,000 fonts in the app’s library, it will likely show up–but there’s no guarantee. I tested out several fonts by taking pictures of my computer, and the correct font was usually in the top two or three choices. The program didn’t do a very good job of identifying the font’s weight. And it didn’t recognize one font, Snell Roundhand, at all, instead offering 20 flowery scripts that vaguely resembled it.
This is the mobile version of a service Monotype has offered for a while on desktop–but now, instead of taking pictures of fonts and finding out more about them later, you can find the next perfect font for your project on the go.