Remove.bg

Kaleido, a photo filtering and marketing company, has released Remove.bg, a free web service that extracts a person from an image and sets them on a transparent background. Using "sophisticated AI technology to detect foreground layers and separate them from the background" they aim to save many hours of work.

As an experiment, this is truly impressive. I tried it with a number of images and it worked extremely well and quite quickly every time. As a tool that you'd actually use in production - not so much. According to the FAQ: "for performance reasons the output image is limited to 500 × 500 pixels. " So, unless you're working on a project meant for rather small screens, this won't do you much good. However, they do aim to make higher resolution versions in the future and it's undeniably fun to play with.