Here's a really funny Google April Fools' joke for geeks that won't get you fired
While Google's main prank this year for the general public went horribly wrong and has already been pulled (the prank added a "mic drop" feature to Gmail that allegedly caused some people to lose their jobs), here's one that you can enjoy without the risk of getting fired.
The Google Cloud team's prank is the "Style Detection for Cloud Vision API."
And it's really funny, especially if you're geeky enough to understand all the jokes. It's still being proudly displayed on the Google for Work official blog and the Google Cloud website.
The joke is this: Google announced a new "Style Detection service" which is essentially a fashion police service that can tell you what your clothes say about you.
As Google explained in its blog post:
Style Detection aims to help people improve their style - and lives - by navigating the complex and fickle landscape of fashion. Does a brown belt go with black shoes? Pleats or no pleats? "To tuck or not to tuck?" is now no longer a question. With Style Detection, we're able to mine our nearly bottomless combined data sets of selfies, fashion periodicals and the unstructured ramblings of design bloggers into a coherent and actionable tool for picking tomorrow's trousers.
It's being "rolled out" as part of Google's real life, computer Cloud Vision service, which is not a joke at all. Cloud Vision powers Google Photos and other apps. It analyzes photos and streaming video and can detect all the objects, what's going on, even people's emotions on their faces. Developers are using the service to make everything from apps to robots that can interact with humans.
The video launching Style Detection made us laugh out loud in certain parts, such as the "scrum" board for analyzing fashion (scrum uses sticky notes as a project management system) and hangover girl.
Sadly, the Google joke didn't go as far as launching an actual Style Detection service, although, it's not a bad idea. There are real fashion advice apps out there that do sort of similar things.
Check it out.