Cats communicate pain through subtle facial expressions, and general LLMs are not built to read them. Recent studies show chatbots agree poorly with expert pain scoring and lean heavily on cues like background and breed. Sylvester's computer vision is purpose-built to see those signals directly, trained on professionally labelled images of real cats.

The updated computer vision model behind the Cat Comfort Check reaches a negative predictive value of 90.3%, which means a comfortable result is reliable enough to meaningfully narrow the field of cats who need a closer look. That reliability sits inside a release that improved every metric in our evaluation suite.