This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: Channel 9.
Who doesn't like making cool robots?
Who doesn't like it when they are easy to build?
Who doesn't like extending them, making them smarter (to a point)?
One of our favorite robot platforms, EZ-Robot, Easy Robotics with Windows 10 and EZ-Robot, has some great extensibility options/plugins.
Sergiy Baydachnyy has written up a cool post on a couple of those plugins, plugins that help you make your robot all that much smarter...
Build Intelligent Robots with EZ-Robot and Microsoft Cognitive Services
What if a robot could tell how you are feeling?
Microsoft Cognitive Services is a set of APIs and SDK services that can enable developers to easily add features that can detect emotion, identify objects and understand language understanding into their applications. Imagine utilizing that same set of features in a robot.
Enter Calgary based EZ-Robot who has created a solution to allow those interested in building robots to create applications for their robots using different SDKs. Their core product called EZ-Builder allows anybody, regardless of programming knowledge, to bring robots to life. The software is available from Windows Store and is able to incorporate Microsoft Cognitive Services to allow for further depth to the EZ-Robot's capabilities..
This post will cover is the use of three plugins compatible with EZ-Builder that are based on Microsoft Cognitive Services. The following are a list of these plugins:
- Bing Speech Recognition: based on Bing Speech API and allows your robots to understand voice commands;
- Microsoft Cognitive Emotion: uses Emotion API to understand your primary (with the most confidence) emotion and it’s confidence. Thanks to that you can program different behavior for your robots depends on your emotions;
- Microsoft Cognitive Vision: based on Computer Vision API and allows you to grab image frames from input video stream to describe them and find some tags that are associated with the frames;
To setup any of these plugins you simple need to install them on your computer and add to your EZ-Builder project. Once you have these plugins in your project, it’s easy to setup each of them. For example, if you want to use voice commands in your project, you need to provide some parameters using Config window below:
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