Sarah.ai, from Cheetah, automatically analyzes photos taken on mobile phones to create stories. It does this by curating the photoset using state-of-the-art machine-learning computer vision algorithms to remove duplicates, to find the best photos, and to discard the bad ones. Users can edit their photobooks by adding/removing photos and write titles and captions on every page. They can also change the sequence and the colors of pages, delete and add pages (to a maximum of 96 pages). Find out more here: http://sarah-book.jp/pages/ai

If you're hunting for options in the $50-250 range, these are some of our favorite gadgets, games, and services (doggy DNA tests, anyone?) to gift someone this year. Many animal lovers prefer to rescue dogs from shelters rather than shell out for a purebred. Now, adopted dogs can trade in their "mutt" moniker for something far more precise. Through Embark, a doggy DNA test kit, a simple cheek swab revealed that our toast-colored rescue dog Fawn was not a mini Golden Retriever, as we had suspected. Embark also tests for certain health conditions and offers to connect pups who are genetically related, arming pet lovers with more knowledge about their companions.

Increasingly, researchers and artists are tinkering with machine-learning software to explore how neural networks can express creativity, whether through generating contemporary paintings or paint swatch names. Designer Philipp Schmitt decided to program a computer to produce a photobook, a process that involved curation as well as creation. The result, he believes, teaches us how to see our surroundings from a new perspective -- "through the eyes of an algorithm," in his words. Drawn from Schmitt's own archive of 207 photographs taken between 2013 and 2017, "Computed Curation" is a 95-foot-long, accordion photobook that includes captions and tags. But you'll quickly notice that these are often odd strings of companion texts.