Google's latest tool can turn your doodles into works of art.

It's launched AutoDraw, a web-based app powered by machine learning. With that technology, AutoDraw can recognise your crude drawings, whether it's a flower or a cake or a smiley face, and it can smartly serve up pre-drawn alternatives created by "talented artists" to replace it. Google is pitching this app as a free, easier alternative to paid, complex programs from the likes of Adobe.

Not only is the app free to use, but it also available on mobile devices. It works like this: draw a cat, or try to anyway, and the auto suggestion tool will attempt to decipher your doodle. At that point, you can choose from a variety of actual cat drawings. You can also turn off the auto suggestions so that you can just draw whatever you want and use the app as a digital sketchpad.

AutoDraw uses the same technology as Google's QuickDraw experiment. While that tells you which objects to draw, AutoDraw is a tool you can open up to make birthday cards or posters. But they both teach a neural network to recognise doodles. Google said AutoDraw can guess hundreds of drawings, and it plans to update it with more suggestions in the future.

Interested artists can contribute to the project from here.