I Built an AI That Recommends Therapy Pets — Here's What I Learned (and the Code)

We've all heard about therapy dogs. But what if you're allergic? Or live in a small apartment? Or just... really vibe with guinea pigs? That was the problem I set out to solve. The result was an AI-powered pet therapy matching system. Here's the full tech breakdown — and a few things that surprised me. The Core Problem Pet therapy is genuinely effective for anxiety, loneliness, and depression. Studies back it up. But "just get a dog" is terrible advice for: Apartment dwellers People with allergies Those with limited mobility Anyone who's never owned a pet and has zero idea what they're getting into The matching problem is actually fascinating from an ML perspective: you're trying to align human emotional needs, lifestyle constraints, and animal behavioral profiles — three completely different feature spaces. The Architecture User Input (survey) ↓ Feature Extraction ↓ Embedding Layer (sentence-transformers) ↓ Similarity Scoring against Animal Profiles ↓ Ranked Recommendations + Explanat