EZ-AI development is on hold right now, well kind of...
We are in the process of working with some services that will allow the capabilities of EZ-AI to be far better than what they currently are. These include Wolfram|Alpha and IBM BlueMix/Watson. Speech Recognition will be performed through Nuance Cloud services. Advanced vision features will be available through OpenCV. A quick search of these services will allow you to see the end goal of what we are doing. These will be in the Rafiki project which is the primary focus at this time for CochranRobotics. We will release a limited use version for free which will replace EZ-AI. All of the current features of the EZ-AI database will be available through the new version. All of the services provided by EZ-AI will be available through REST queries and exposed services. This will allow plugins to ARC to be able to use these services.
There has been a huge amount of changes to what is possible since I first started working on EZ-AI. This huge shift of improved technologies has made it necessary to rework EZ-AI so that it can continue to grow and mature.
We are also toying with the idea of allowing programmers to write their own business logic layer within Rafiki. This would allow a programmer to be able to use the core services of Rafiki/EZ-AI and write their own applications with the data that is returned. It will probably be a while before this is implemented, but it is something that we are trying to make happen.
I have probably said too much, but wanted to give you all a picture of what is happening and why EZ-AI isn't being worked on directly. We hope to have our new AI available around the end of the year. There are multiple developers working on this while I find come up with solutions to other problems that arise.
As far as Rafiki goes, the pods are functioning great and additional code/abilities are being added almost daily. The models for the pods are being tweaked to expose the HDMI and usb ports and network port to the outside of the case. This will allow someone to connect a mouse, keyboard and monitor to the pod and use it as a computer if they would like. The Rafiki Bot is about 1/3 of the way printed. I am making modifications to the models as needed and reprinting some of the parts as needed. There will be 6 subsystems on this robot. 3 of these subsystems have been written and are ready to use. The other 3 subsystems cant be worked on until more of the Rafiki Bot has been printed. The 3 that are not complete are all very similar for motor control. I hope to have these ready in a couple of weeks. I should be able to show a demo of the Rafiki Bot in about a month, and then all of the robot programming starts. I will work on the charger base shortly after the robot has been completed and the pods are all working with all of their functionality.
One more thing on EZ-AI... As a part of this rewrite, you will just need to have Java installed on your computer to install and use EZ-AI. The days of the huge install will be behind us so it should make it far better in the long run. The other thing that this allows is robot platform independence. I will be working on modules in ARC to allow the features of EZ-AI to be accessible far more easily. This will probably not be worked on until December at the earliest.
Okay, going back to my robot cave. Have a great day all.
@Cochran Cool bro. I'm all the way north of Houston so I'm only about 5 hours away from Dallas
David,
Question about the new EZ-AI: you noted that users will be able to choose and subscribe to the features that they want. If a subscription lapses, or the user decides they are satisfied with the current "level of intelligence" and don't renew, what happens? Does their bot go dark? Or does it continue to function as it did, but it would no longer get updates and improvements?
Thanks!
It goes dark as the information is not on your network. The knowledge base resides on an api. The speech recognition is an api. The service wouldn't do anything because the speech wouldn't be parsed and the knowledge base couldn't be accessed.
In order to offer the level of product that we wanted to offer, we leverage some third party tools which are mentioned in this thread. These cost money to offer and each transaction costs money.
To use EZ-AI will cost a monthly fee based on the level of the knowledge and the speech recognition engine you choose to use along with the number of requests you want to make per month. The advanced services will be better and cost more.
This thread also discusses what happens when you go beyond the number of requests that you have purchased, but basically we shut you off until you have either increased your total number of requests available by purchasing more, or you go dark for knowledge and speech recognition access in EZ-AI.
Implemented section had to be completed before the other things could be handled for the most part. We should have the Implementing list done by May 1. I am seriously considering using May the 4th as the release date for the Beta simply on principle as it will be Star Wars Day... Anyway, here is a list of the things completed and the things planned.
IMPLEMENTED:
IMPLEMENTING:
David,
Any estimate of subscription costs?
I am waiting on one cost to be finalized. I hope to have this finalized this week. Once I have this cost I will post a breakdown of the subscription cost.
The subscription cost will be $30.00 per month for 1000 requests but read this through and you will see how the costs can be limited and why there is a charge. A request would be something like "Tell me to wash the car tomorrow" or "What is Myotonia Congenita?"
If you have a reminder setup and EZ-AI reminds you of this, this is not a transaction. If EZ-AI recognizes you and says hello, this isn't a transaction.
We are working on options to allow you to reduce your cost for the information that is returned. Here is a scenario of a paid for service vs using a free service. The paid for service has its information vetted through professionals in that area (in this example a Dr. Specializing in neurological muscle disorders). It would return a phrase that is meant to be spoken and display more detailed information on the computer screen if you have chosen this option. The free option would return the information from Wikipedia. This could be quite large and could be riddled with errors due to Wikipedia information not being vetted through a neurological muscle disorder doctor in this case.
Another of the paid for services is the best speech recognition service available. The odds of a normal user correctly pronouncing Myotonia Congenita (unless they are somewhat familiar with this disease) are pretty small. The speech recognition engine that we use will handle small mispronunciations of words and the knowledge system that we use does a great job of finding matches even with misspellings of words. This makes the experience far more enjoyable. Without these paid for services, we only know that the experience will not be as good as the paid for services.
I haven't made this publicly known but now is as good of a time as any...
EZ-AI is more than just an application. It is an AI framework. This allows programmers (java mainly) to extend the features of EZ-AI for their own purposes. By simply dropping a class file in a directory and making a simple modification or addition via a webpage, you can modify EZ-AI to use whatever services you would like it to use. This is the real power behind EZ-AI and where we see its potential. Additionally, you can customize the actions performed based on the main service that we use. You can setup your own API.AI account, download our environment to yours via a zip file download and then modify actions to then be specific to your environment. These do require some level of programming experience but you have the ability to change EZ-AI into whatever you want it to be.
What I am basically saying is that if someone develops a class that would use other services for information that are free (us or anyone else) then you would be able to use this class to bypass some of the cost associated with EZ-AI. If someone wrote a different class that accessed a different API on the internet and this didn't cost any money, you would be able to download and start using this class for actions pertaining to that type of request. You would make a change in your account and your billing the next month would not include the charges for the paid for service that was replaced by this new class.
This is all confusing for people who don't work with this type of a product and I understand that, but there are options to reduce or even practically eliminate the monthly cost of running EZ-AI. What we are delivering is the full functioning paid for EZ-AI at $30.00 per month. There will be documentation on how to go about changing out services and such. I don't have a timeline on when this would happen yet, but the goal is to allow you to make EZ-AI into whatever you want or need it to be.
David,
My use for EZ-AI would be purely recreational: have some interesting conversations, have him remind me of appointments, dates, etc. Considering that I don't use half the functionality on my smartphone (a Luddite working in the cyberage!), many of the features are not important to me. I don't use social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter), I'm afraid to fly and I don't invest in the stock market.
If I understand you correctly, EZ-AI "basic" will start at $30/month, but the user will be able to opt-out of certain features, which will reduce or eliminate the cost? Or at least bring it down drastically. If that's the case, it's very good news!