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NeuraldrawOwn product

AI-powered doodling game app for smartphones

  • UX Design
  • UI Design
  • iOS Development
  • Front-end Development
  • Back-end Development
  • Visual Identity
  • Deep Learning (Computer Vision)
Various doodles of palm trees, spiders, clouds and stars tha users made in Neural Draw.
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Getting from Google’s Quick, Draw! to an AI doodle game tailored for a fun mobile experience

Say what you will about doodling, but you have to admit it’s one of humanity’s most important forms of expression. That’s why we loved Google’s ‘Quick, Draw!’ experiment and how well it could recognize human doodling. But as we played with it, we realised we missed the more friendly mobile medium.

Smiling girl with iPhone in her hands, playing Neural Draw.

What it takes to make a smartphone doodle smart

We mixed and matched social gaming components we saw work for mobile games with Quick, Draw!’s doodling experience to create a full game. For the underlying AI tech, we started with an open-sourced dataset. We had to build an AI layer that was accurate enough to guess the user’s doodlings, but also instantly responsive to not compromise the game experience.

Hand holding a mobile phone on which Neural Dra prompts users to draw a spider in 30 seconds.

The Neural Network that could get the job done

Instead of the Recurrent Neural Network the ‘Quick, Draw!’ team used, we switched to an on-device Convolutional Neural Network model which is 400kB in size. It does inference in between 14-24ms, depending on the type of device, and works in real time on iPhone 6 or newer generation smartphones. Moreso, the build supports an unlimited number of people playing at the same time, with little need to scale the backend of the app.

Visual representation of the Convolutional Neural Network model Halcyon Mobule used at the development of Neural Draw.

On the user side, gameplay success means rising in the ranks

We wanted to design a game that was easily played by any kind of user. They would start with simple levels and move up towards more complex doodling challenges. All the while, the app tracked their performance in a tournament-style point system, so the user could check their position in the leaderboard and see how they’re compared to players all-over the world.

This format also gave control to the user on how much time they spent playing: they could have some fun in some spare time standing in line, but also keep playing if they wanted to.

Neural Draw leaderboard showing the position and score of the users.

“All in all, Neural Draw was a great AI-product design and implementation exercise for the team. We proved that you could take cutting edge AI and combine it with mature mobile technology to create an enjoyable mobile experience.”

LEVENTE SZABO - HALCYON MOBILE CO-FOUNDER, HALCYON LABS LEAD

OVER

345 doodle
prompts

GUESSES YOUR DOODLE IN UNDER

24ms

ON-DEVICE AI ALGORITHM SIZE

400kB

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