Tony is a Geek

Okay, so you may have noticed that recently, I made a 3D Avatar / Digital Human using the Unity 3D engine and connected it up to the IBM Watson SDK . Well, straight after doing that piece of work, I thought...hmmm... I also have the Unreal Engine installed on my laptop too, I wonder if there is an IBM Watson SDK sample app that could use that engine to do what I did above... A quick DuckDuckGo search later and yep, here is a gitHub . A quick 50,000ft difference check is - what are you more comfortable writing your code in? C# from Microsoft (Unity) or C/C++ (Unreal Engine) What have you had more experience in using? So, why am I pointing this out?  Well, I happened to stumble over a Digital Human that is created and controlled by the Unreal Engine....and well, it's pretty awesome! My Unity / "couple of days" effort project versus this (probably) quite a few £££££ effort doesn't really compare - but what it does show is that this level of technology and ef...

most certainly not a "new" idea, but I eventually got around to putting this together: https://learn.adafruit.com/mini-raspberry-pi-handheld-notebook-palmtop?view=all I 3D printed out the parts, takes about 6-8hours in total.  I already had one of these bluetooth keyboards knocking around from way-back-when, it's kinda cool as it has a little mouse pad on the right hand side and if you set up the Pi properly, it picks it up on boot-up and "just works". I have a 3.5" touchscreen and an RPi3, albeit not the same screen as shown in the article, (but I'll come back to that later).  I already had a battery power battery from another project that didn't go anywhere, so it seemed like a good idea to throw all these parts together and make this. The one gotcha I currently have is related to the hinge screws/nut things, I don't have what is needed - I've gone through every "box of bits" I have - what I did find was 2 pop-rivets ...

Totally, 100% selfish plug :-) https://developer.ibm.com/recipes/tutorials/create-a-3d-digital-human-with-ibm-watson-assistant-and-unity3d Have you ever thought to yourself: y'know, I want my own HOLLY ( from Red Dwarf ) I have "skills"..... I'm a computer software developer..... I have "stuff" on my laptop that I've installed / used a few times, but forgotten what it was for again.... .....and you have a spare 30-40 minutes?  (and $35) Then look no further, welcome to the world of Unity, UMA2, SALSA, IBM Watson SDK and the IBM Watson Assistant API service! I wrote an article that may be useful to follow if you want to do the above sort of thing on a rainy Saturday morning.... https://developer.ibm.com/recipes/tutorials/create-a-3d-digital-human-with-ibm-watson-assistant-and-unity3d (and yes, I know the TTS is not that accurate, I didn't give it much/if any training, so I'm surprised it did as well as it did!) ...

Original article available HERE As the article says: "Chatbots are having a significant impact on numerous fields - especially the psychology sector.  Developers caution these tech tools aren't a replacement for human interactions with experts, but it's already clear chatbots are an always-available resource - which isn't the case for human health practitioners." Checkout WOEBOT " Woebot is an automated conversational agent (chatbot) who helps you monitor mood and learn about yourself. Drawing from a therapeutic framework known as Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, Woebot asks people how they’re feeling and what is going on in their lives in the format of brief daily conversations. Woebot also talks to you about mental health and wellness and sends you videos and other useful tools depending on your mood and needs at that moment. You can think of Woebot as a choose-your-own-adventure self-help book that is capable of storing all of your entries, and gets ...

https://www.engadget.com/2018/03/20/ibm-watson-assistant/ IBM's Watson-based voice assistant is coming to cars and smart homes This all sounds very familiar :-D http://tonyisageek.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/ibm-bmw-and-iot.html ......... One of IBM's first partners Harman will demonstrate Watson Assistant at the event through a digital cockpit aboard a Maserati GranCabrio, though the companies didn't elaborate on what it can do. In fact, IBM already released a Watson-powered voice assistant for cybersecurity early last year. You'll be able to access Watson Assistant via text or voice, depending on the device and how IBM's partner decides to incorporate it. So, you'll definitely be using voice if it's a smart speaker, but you might be able to text commands to a home device. Speaking of commands, it wasn't just designed to follow them -- it was designed to learn from your actions and remember your preferences. If you allow the Watson-powered ap...

This is something close to my own heart and something I'd like to get more involved with in the future. https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/robotics/artificial-intelligence/ai-detects-papaya-ripeness I like the idea that the robot harvesters can use Visual Object detection and then Recognition to examine the fruit and determine if it needs picking - how it does that picking raises an eyebrow, but mixed with robotic arm and pressure sensitive 'finger' tips and some good coding it'd be feasible. Then, in the grocery shop as a customer, you can whip out your phone, scan the fruit on the shelf and it can "highlight" which fruit will ripen when, allowing you to get the best choice of fruit to meet your needs.  ie. do I want to eat it today? actually, I want to eat 3 of these in 3 days time, which are the best 3 to select? sounds all very cyberpunk....

Frank, I doff my cap to you Sir, awesome find and very relevant!

Meet CIMON: http://fortune.com/2018/02/28/ibm-cimon-robot/ Called CIMON (Crew Interactive Mobile Companion), the new crew member is about the size of a medicine ball and will work alongside human astronauts in space. The “floating brain” is equipped with IBM’s  Watson artificial intelligence technology  and is expected to assist astronauts during the European Space Agency’s Horizons mission in June.

very minor update, but great fun along the way.... As previous shared, I setup an RPi3 with ROS and was about to move into the coding of ROS nodes .  Whilst that was okay...it involved me having to use Python and whilst I see it's really useful to use, it's not my native tongue.  That is JavaScript...has been client & server-side since about 1998, so it's my go-to comfort first choice. So rather than attempting to port everything in my head into Python and then into ROS nodes, I thought I would do what I needed to do: "to get it to work" and then I'd look at porting it over. What did that require?  Well, installing NodeJS and npm on the RPi3 for one.  Dead easy and simple to do. Oh, I forgot to say what it is/was I wanted to actually achieve!  okay, I want to be able to SHOUT at T1ll13 and for her to always be listening via a microphone ( no trigger "Alexa" or "Google" words for me ), to convert that Speech to Text, then s...

Back in the day, I purchased one of these phones.  ( Wow! was it really in 2013?...I suppose it must have been )   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZTE_Open The cool thing about it at the time was, it wasn't Android, Apple or Microsoft.  It had it's own OS and had the potential to investigate "other options" for apps.  As it was backed by Firefox / Mozilla, it made sense that it was driven by the Web and more specifically, Web apps that run in web browsers.  Hey, that suited me fine, s'what I've been mostly doing since, well, since, for far too long. Whilst I have no issue, when the need requires,  to code for a native Android java app, or flip my head the other way and code in Swift for an iOS device, it did kind of irk me that I had to start following the code religion camps again... it also conflicted that I wasn't focused on just coding for the device itself, but having to code for the server-side APIs and usually a web app that also offered the...