# Nose ID: I Taught an AI to Recognize Dogs by Their Nose-Print > Source: > Published: 2026-08-17 06:54:15+00:00 **Nose ID** — a biometric dog identification system. Instead of a collar tag, chip scanner, or manual lookup, it identifies a dog the way security systems identify people: from a unique physical trait. In this case, the dog's nose-print — the ridge and texture pattern on a dog's nose, which is as individual to each dog as a fingerprint is to a human. Scan a dog's nose → the system tells you who it is (with a spoken voice response) or offers to enroll it if it's new. **1. Embedding extraction (the core ML piece)** Rather than training a nose-print classifier from scratch, I used a **pretrained MobileNetV2** (ImageNet weights) as a feature extractor, stripping its classification head and using the penultimate layer's pooled output as a 1280-dimensional embedding vector. This is a standard transfer-learning technique — mid-level CNN filters trained on general images still respond well to texture, edges, and ridge patterns, which is exactly what distinguishes one nose-print from another. **2. Matching** Each enrolled dog's embedding is L2-normalized and stored. A new scan's embedding is compared against all stored ones using **cosine similarity**. A similarity above a tuned threshold (0.90) counts as a match. **3. AI-generated personality** On enrollment, **Google Gemini** generates a short, fun bio for each dog from its name and breed. **4. Voice confirmation** On identification, **ElevenLabs** turns the result into a spoken response — "Welcome back, Bella. Access granted." or "I don't recognize this nose. Would you like to enroll?" Both Gemini and ElevenLabs changed parts of their APIs the same week I built this: `generateContent` endpoint to their new `/v1/voices` to find one my account could actually use.This template provides a minimal setup to get React working in Vite with HMR and some ESLint rules. Currently, two official plugins are available: The React Compiler is not enabled on this template because of its impact on dev & build performances. To add it, see [this documentation](https://react.dev/learn/react-compiler/installation). If you are developing a production application, we recommend using TypeScript with type-aware lint rules enabled. Check out the [TS template](https://github.com/vitejs/vite/tree/main/packages/create-vite/template-react-ts) for information on how to integrate TypeScript and [ typescript-eslint](https://typescript-eslint.io) in your project.