"Artificial intelligence (AI) is already able to mimic sight and hearing," reports CNBC. Now a startup called Osmo wants to use technology to digitize another sense: smell by digitizing smells.
The co-founder is a former Google researcher. The company has already built an artificial intelligence that can predict what things smell like, and it believes this could prove very useful.
"We know that smell contains information that we can use to detect disease. But computers cannot "speak" this language and cannot yet interpret this data... Eventually we will be able to detect diseases by smell and we continue to build this technology. It's not going to happen this year or anytime soon, but we're on the right track."
The CoinTelegraph he describes how the company invented a training dataset from scratch — a kind of “smell map” with examples of molecular bond associations to teach AI to recognize specific patterns.
The team also hopes to develop a method to recreate smells using their molecular makeup. This would, for example, allow a computer in one part of the world to "smell" something and then send that information to another computer to reconstruct the smell, essentially teleporting an odor over the Internet.
