Google Lowers The Artificial Intelligence Bar With Complete DIY Kits

April 26, 2018 by 45 Comments

Last year, Google released an artificial intelligence kit aimed at makers, with two different flavors: Vision to recognize people and objections, and Voice to create a smart speaker. Now, Google is back with a new version to make it even easier to get started.

The main difference in this year’s (v1.1) kits is that they include some basic hardware, such as a Raspberry Pi and an SD card. While this might not be very useful to most Hackaday readers, who probably have a spare Pi (or 5) lying around, this is invaluable for novice makers or the educational market. These audiences now have access to an all-in-one solution to build projects and learn more about artificial intelligence.

We’ve previously seen toys, phones, and intercoms get upgrades with an AIY kit, but would love to see more! [Mike Rigsby] has used one in his robot dog project to detect when people are smiling. These updated kits are available at Target (Voice, Vision). If the kit is too expensive, our own [Inderpreet Singh] can show you how to build your own.

Via [BGR].

Listen To The Netherworld With Artificial Intelligence

October 24, 2017 by 19 Comments

It’s that time of year again, and with Halloween arguably being the hacker’s perfect holiday, we’re starting to see a tick up in projects with a spooky theme. Most seem to do with making some otherwise tame Halloween decorations scarily awesome, but this is different — using artificial intelligence to search for ghosts.

It seems like [Matt Reed]’s “DeepWhisper” project is meant to be taken as light-hearted fun for the spooky season, but there may be a touch of seriousness to his efforts to listen in on ghostly conversations. The principle behind this is electronic voice phenomena (EVP), whereby the metabolically and/or dimensionally challenged are purported to influence electronic systems, resulting in heavily processed audio clips that seem to have a whispered endearment from the departed or a threat from a malevolent spirit. DeepWhisper takes this a step further by using a Raspberry Pi to feed audio into the Google Cloud Speech API for analysis. If anything is whispered in one of the 110 or so languages Google knows, it’ll get displayed on a screen. [Matt] plans to set DeepWhisper up in the aptly-named Butchertown section of Nashville and live-stream the results next week.

It’ll be interesting to see what Google’s neural network makes out of the random noise it will probably only ever hear. And [Matt] is planning on releasing his code for all to see, so there may be some valuable cloud techniques to learn from DeepWhisper. But in the unlikely event that he does discover ghosts, it’s nice to know you can have the tools and the talent to bust ’em.

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Artificial Intelligence At The Top Of A Professional Sport

October 20, 2017 by 20 Comments

The lights dim and the music swells as an elite competitor in a silk robe passes through a cheering crowd to take the ring. It’s a blueprint familiar to boxing, only this pugilist won’t be throwing punches.

OpenAI created an AI bot that has beaten the best players in the world at this year’s International championship. The International is an esports competition held annually for Dota 2, one of the most competitive multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games.

Each match of the International consists of two 5-player teams competing against each other for 35-45 minutes. In layman’s terms, it is an online version of capture the flag. While the premise may sound simple, it is actually one of the most complicated and detailed competitive games out there. The top teams are required to practice together daily, but this level of play is nothing new to them. To reach a professional level, individual players would practice obscenely late, go to sleep, and then repeat the process. For years. So how long did the AI bot have to prepare for this competition compared to these seasoned pros? A couple of months.

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Google AIY: Artificial Intelligence Yourself

May 4, 2017 by 35 Comments

When Amazon released the API to their voice service Alexa, they basically forced any serious players in this domain to bring their offerings out into the hacker/maker market as well. Now Google and Raspberry Pi have come together to bring us ‘Artificial Intelligence Yourself’ or AIY.

A free hardware kit made by Google was distributed with Issue 57 of the MagPi Magazine which is targeted at makers and hobbyists which you can see in the video after the break. The kit contains a Raspberry Pi Voice Hat, a microphone board, a speaker and a number of small bits to mount the kit on a Raspberry Pi 3. Putting all of it together and following the instruction on the official site gets you a Google Voice Interaction Kit with a bunch of IOs just screaming to be put to good use.

The source code for the python app can be downloaded from GitHub and consists of a loop that awaits a trigger. This trigger can be a press of a button or a clap near the microphones. When a trigger is detected, the recorder function takes over sending the stream to the Google Cloud. Speech-to-Text conversion happens there and the result is returned via a Text-To-Speech engine that helps the system talk back. The repository suggests that the official Voice Kit SD Image (893 MB download) is based on Raspbian so don’t go reflashing a memory card right away, you should be able to add this to an existing install.

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The Future Of Artificial Intelligence

February 13, 2017 by 59 Comments

Last week we covered the past and current state of artificial intelligence — what modern AI looks like, the differences between weak and strong AI, AGI, and some of the philosophical ideas about what constitutes consciousness. Weak AI is already all around us, in the form of software dedicated to performing specific tasks intelligently. Strong AI is the ultimate goal, and a true strong AI would resemble what most of us have grown familiar with through popular fiction.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is a modern goal many AI researchers are currently devoting their careers to in an effort to bridge that gap. While AGI wouldn’t necessarily possess any kind of consciousness, it would be able to handle any data-related task put before it. Of course, as humans, it’s in our nature to try to forecast the future, and that’s what we’ll be talking about in this article. What are some of our best guesses about what we can expect from AI in the future (near and far)? What possible ethical and practical concerns are there if a conscious AI were to be created? In this speculative future, should an AI have rights, or should it be feared?

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Pokemon Artificial Intellegence

Pokemon Artificial Intelligence Is Smarter Than You

May 19, 2014 by 12 Comments

Who out there hasn’t angrily thrown a game controller across the room after continually getting killed by some stupid game-controlled villain? That is such a bummer! You probably wished there was some way to ‘just get past that point’. To take a step in that direction, [Ben] created an Artificial Intelligence program that will win at Pokemon Blue for Game Boy Advance.

The game is run in a Game Boy Advance emulator known as Visual Boy Tracer, which itself is a modified version of the most common GBA emulator, Visual Boy Advance. What sets Visual Boy Advance apart from the rest is that it has a memory dump feature which allows the user to send both the RAM and the ROM out of the emulator. The RAM holds all values currently needed by the emulator, this includes everything from text arrow flash times to details about currently battling Pokemon to the players position in the currently loaded map. The memory dump feature is key to allow the AI to understand what is happening in the game.

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Want To Learn Artificial Intelligence? Good.

September 5, 2011 by 39 Comments

In a little more than a month, tens of thousands of people around the world will attend a class on Artificial Intelligence at Stanford. Registration for this class is still open for both class ‘tracks’. The “basic” track is simply watching lectures and answering quizzes, or a slightly more advanced version of MIT OpenCourseware or Khan Academy. The “advanced” track is the full class, requires homework and exams, and aspires to Stanford difficulty.

With thousands of people taking this class, there’s bound to be a few study groups popping up around the web. The largest ones we’ve seen are /r/aiclass on Reddit and the stack overflow style aiqus. The most common reply to ‘what language should I learn from this class?’ is Python, although there’s an online code repo that has the text’s working code in Lisp, Java, C++ and C#.

If AI doesn’t float your boat, there are two more classes being taught from Stanford this fall: machine learning and introduction to databases. Any way you look at it, you’re getting to take a class from one of the preeminent instructors in the field for free. Do yourself a favor and sign up.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in. You can stop now.