Chilli Identifier
What chilli is this?
Take or upload a photo of a pepper — pods or plant — and our AI will suggest the most likely variety, ranked by confidence and matched to The Chilli Index so you can read up on it. Free to use.
How it works
Your photo is read by a vision model, which describes what it can see — pod shape, proportions, surface texture, colour, how the fruit hangs, and the leaf and flower if they're in frame — and proposes the varieties those features fit. Each suggestion comes back with a confidence of low, medium or high, and its reasoning, so you can judge whether it looked at the things you would have looked at.
Those names are then matched against the varieties in this index, so a suggestion you find plausible takes you straight to the record. Your photo is sent to the AI provider to be read and isn't stored on the site — we keep the resulting variety name, so we can see what people are looking up, and nothing else. You get eight free identifications a day.
How accurate it is
Treat every answer as a shortlist, not a determination. It is at its best on distinctive pods — the scorpion tails, the wrinkled chinense superhots, a Bishop's Crown, a rocoto cut open to show black seeds. It is genuinely unreliable wherever varieties converge, and a great many of them do.
A red, finger-length, smooth-skinned pod could be a cayenne, a ring of fire, a Thai dragon or a dozen others, and no photograph will separate them. Colour is a weak signal because almost everything ripens through green, and several varieties ripen through purple, cream or chocolate on the way. Size is unreadable without something in shot for scale. Selections within a family — the 7 Pots, the habaneros — are often indistinguishable by eye even to people who grow them.
Where it says low confidence, it means it. A single named variety with high confidence is worth acting on; three names with low confidence means the honest answer is “something in this family”.
Getting a better result
- Shoot in daylight, against a plain background, with the pod filling the frame.
- Put a coin, a finger or a ruler in shot — scale settles more questions than colour does.
- Include the plant if you can: leaf shape, whether pods point up or hang down, and flower colour all narrow it considerably. Purple flowers and black seeds mean a pubescens — a rocoto or a manzano — and nothing else.
- Photograph fully ripe fruit where possible, and say so if it isn't.
Before you eat anything
Don't use this — or any identifier — to decide whether something is safe to eat. An unknown pod from an unlabelled plant could be far hotter than it looks, and plenty of other nightshades — including genuinely poisonous ones — carry small red fruit that reads as a chilli in a photograph. If you don't know what you grew, the answer is not to eat it.
Growing chillies? The Sprowt logs your season from sown to harvest — with an AI plant doctor built in.