You can now use Snapchat's augmented reality camera to identify dog breeds and plant species

• Snapchat has armored its camera was a flurry of augmented-reality features in recent years that allow users to apply face filters and play with interactive lenses.
• At the Snap Partner Summit last week, the company debuted new partners for Scan, its press-and-hold-activated feature that gives users more information when they point their camera at various objects and surroundings.
• In addition to solving math problems and finding online links for real-life products, users can now use Scan for identifying dog breeds, plant species, and nutrition information for food.

If the wildly popular dog filter hasn't given you enough puppy-related content on Snapchat, you'll soon be able to use the app to identify the breeds of dogs you encounter offline.

Snap has debuted new partners for Scan, its feature that lets users gather more information on real-life objects just by pointing the app's camera at them. Now, Snapchat users will be able to use the feature to identify breeds of dogs, species of plants and trees, and nutritional facts about packaged food.

Snapchat has long invested in AR, including object recognition technology. The Information reported back in 2017 that Snapchat was working on a way to scan objects in the real world. Since then, the Snap Camera's scanning ability has grown, ranging from the silly to the handy.

Users can access dancing figures and animations when they point their phone at a flat surface or a piece of pizza, and also harness the technology for more useful tasks — like identifying a song playing using Shazam, recognizing real-life items to buy on Amazon, and even solving math equations on homework.

Snapchat's Scan objection-recognition feature debuted in 2019 at Snap's Partner Summit, the invite-only event the company launched just last year to compete with annual developer conferences from tech giants like Facebook, Apple, and Google. This year's Snap Partner Summit — which took place on June 11 — was forced to go virtual due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Snap says the additions to Scan — including Dog Scanner, PlantSnap, and Nutrition Scanner, and various brand experiences — will be made available to users later this year.

At the Partner Summit, Snap also unveiled a new "action bar" for navigating Snapchat, additions to its slate of original content and games, and in-conversation Minis for friends to coordinate and plan activities together..