Point your camera at anything green, on your shelf, in the garden, or out on the trail, and Vivary names it right there on your phone. When it's sure, it says so. When it isn't, it says that too, and Ken, your resident naturalist, helps guide you to the right species.
We'll email your TestFlight invite when the next wave opens. Keep an eye on your inbox. Ken's looking forward to meeting your plants.
Most plant ID apps act like oracles. They give you one species name and one number, and when the photo is unclear they make something up. A botanist won't. Vivary works that way too, across three tiers.
A small model that runs entirely on your phone, trained to see the way a botanist does. It reads family, genus, and species at once, and gives you the most specific level it actually trusts. When it can't reach the species, it hands you the genus or the family instead of throwing up “unknown.”
Sometimes the detail that decides it isn't in your photo. Vivary asks for the one shot that would settle it, a leaf up close, a flower, the underside of a fern, and reads that frame instead of guessing from the first.
For the plants no catalog covers, a vision-language model works it out in the open: look closely, key it to a family, narrow to a genus, and stay honestly unsure at the species when it should. We grade it on how sound that reasoning is, not just whether it guessed the name.
The families our model can't place from a casual photo are, almost one for one, the same families a trained botanist can't place either, for the same reasons. When your identifier fails the way an expert fails, you're modeling the problem, not fighting it.
A first guess is a starting point, not the answer. When two look-alikes come down to one detail your photo missed, Vivary asks for that shot and reads it again. It's what a botanist does when they ask to see a single clean leaf.
Every ID comes with the characters behind it, the same things a botanist would look at. Here's what Ken read off the honey locust, and the one the close-up nailed down.
Name a plant, keep it, and look after it over time. Everything is laid out like a real field-guide entry, and where the data runs out, Vivary says so instead of filling the gap.
It all happens on your device. You get the species, its common name, and the next-best matches, each with the confidence behind it, in Ken's plain words.
within kenNo account to recognize a fern. Your photos and your collection stay on the phone, because there's no server on the other end to send them to.
Light, water, humidity, and a nudge when the next watering is due, laid out as field-guide rows. Where there's no reliable number, it says “no data available” rather than inventing one.
A health check looks over the leaves for pests, stress, and overwatering, then points you toward a fix. It won't hand you a diagnosis it can't stand behind.
A running record of everything you grow, watched over time across three places. It's the vivary the app takes its name from.
Ken lives in the Ask tab, and he's warm, precise, and knowledgeable. His name comes from ken, the range of what a person can know. He tells you what he's sure of, flags what he isn't, and never passes a guess off as a fact.
Identifying a plant, curating your collection, and caring for them happens on your phone without an account. A few features actually need to reason, like chatting with Ken, health checks, and the Botanist VLM, and those run in the cloud. We tell you exactly when that line gets crossed, and nothing leaves your phone unless you start it.
These are real screens from the current TestFlight build: an on-device ID, the Wild field journal, the weather-aware calendar, and a shared-care garden bed. Every confidence word and field mark is what testers actually see.
I'm Dallas, the founder and sole developer of Vivary. As a gardener myself, I wasn't satisfied with the “false confidence” that other plant identification products offer, or their lack of features to help manage my plants the way I enjoy caring for them. From how I organize my house plants to how I work in the garden, I've built each feature with a personal touch, so I'd have the app I've always wanted: an honest plant identification app that works anywhere you might be experiencing the joy of interacting with plants.
