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.
Just so everyone knows, we are still working on EZ-AI. We have published a presi showing what the release will have in it.
We spent some time at a conference last weekend demonstrating our AI to get feedback from people, and also promoting our new school. The crowd wasn't as large as the promoters had promised but we still got plenty of feedback along with some good promotion.
School link
EZ-AI presi
Rafiki was also shown off a bit. We didn't have him doing a lot because I wanted to focus on the school and EZ-AI information gathering. I was able to offer some assistance to the R2 Builders group and a few other groups at the show who want to make their robot props into actual robots. Anyway, enjoy the presi.
Hi David,
I was happy to hear you made it to the conference.
I enjoyed the presentation. It really showed the structure and features EZ-AI will offer. Will the first full release of EZ-AI available soon? I assume the "POD" will be a device offered also. Any projected release date window?
Ron
Hey Dave....
Typo on the school link. In the last paragraph you have "...continued support your school." Should be "...continued support for your school."
Alan
Thank you!
Ron, I hope so... I have had to step away from the EZ-AI development and let Nick take it over so I can get everything lined out with the school. I plan on going to Dallas on Thursday for work but hope to find some time to spend with him there catching up on where we are at... I will let you know.
Do you any updates on Rafiki robot itself. Will it be available soon?.
I had a few family emergencies that have prevented me from working on anything robot related for a bit. I plan on getting back to this after Thanksgiving.
The gist of the post is that there are a lot of things that have changed personally and with technology over the past 2 years that have caused me to stop this project and focus my attention in another area. Here is a list of these things.
Personally first
2 years ago, my daughter was injured during a cheer leading performance. In and of itself, this wouldn't have been a major thing to recover from but it lead us down a rabbit hole of situations that I will describe. My daughter tore her long thoracic nerve in her right shoulder. This caused her scapula to wing out and her shoulder to drop. There are literally 2 doctors in the US that have a clue about this injury but we didn't discover who they are until after two years of therapy and pain for my daughter. This injury caused us to have to home school our daughter which is another topic, but the pain caused her not to be able to sit in a classroom for more than about 15 minutes without being in severe pain. While doing EMG nerve tests early on to discover the extent of the injury, it was discovered that she has a rare disease called Myotonia Congenita Thomsen disease which is a nuerological condition which causes here muscles to lockup after tightening. This is a very rare disease (one other person in Oklahoma City has been diagnosed with it). This sent us down another trail of genetic testing and a lot of research to see how this will affect her life. Because of this she will not be able to have children and is also greatly affected by different types of medications and also affects her in other ways. We found a doctor in Houston TX who performs surgery to solve the issue with the long thoracic nerve and he performed the surgery last weekend which fixed the pain that she was having. Needless to say, all of these medical situations were expensive and time consuming so my focus on EZ-AI has been taken away from the project.
My grandson was diagnosed with autism. We have been helping his parents with finding help to learn how to handle his outbursts and what causes them. I am one of the few people that he reacts to on any sort of human level. This has consumed a lot of our financial resources and my time. I expect that it will continue to do so, but we are doing what we can to try to assist his parents and siblings.
My wife has had many medical conditions over the past few years, and had a 3 level neck fusion earlier this year. She is recovering but is not able to help as much with the grandchildren or our daughter. She is recovering but it hasn't been easy for her. This too has consumed a lot of resources along with time and money.
All of this has left me trying to recover from these issues. I have been trying to come up with something that my son can do that he will excel at (grandsons father) that will also allow him to be home more. We have decided to start a robotics school directed toward home-schooled students. There is a large market for this and really nothing exists that fits quite good enough, so we have developed a curriculum and a way to work with the students over the internet. At first we were going to focus on a brick and mortar school but we have decided that with technology being what it is now, we can do this virtually instead, which allows us to reach many more students world wide and also reduces costs drastically. This is where my focus has been for my robot time over the past 3 months or so.
EZ-AI was my other son's project (the programmer son) and we had a short meeting last weekend about the issues that we see with this product. EZ-AI is a good idea, but we lack the funding to make it a really cost effective product. The reason that I say that is as follows.
Many other products have become available over the last 2 years which allow a lot of the features that we were including in EZ-AI to be publicly available. These include Cortana, ok google and Siri from the desktop, and Google Home and Amazon Echo for hardware solutions. Every one of these has one thing in common that we can't do. You pay a one time charge for each of these (ether computer OS or a hardware device) and then you can use these devices as much as you want without being charged by these companies for their use. This kills EZ-AI because we will never be able to get the product anywhere near this price point. We have to pay for services, and as such have to pass this along to the users of our services.
There are some laws that were passed (one in the US and one in England) that make me not want to be in the world of cloud services. We were not going to store what someone does on these devices at all on our authentication server. These laws require online service providers to house the activity of its users for a minimum of one year. I don't like this in the slightest as it would require me to do so and then possibly have to turn over a users activity to authorities. This prevents me from perusing this type of a business.
There are laws against recording youth without their parents consent. This means that if our platform were to be used by anyone under 18 years of age without their parents knowing about it, and we identified the person using facial recognition (which requires recording) then we could be liable. I really don't like this either and it could never happen, but it could open me up to litigation that I wouldn't be able to afford. I believe that this is why the devices that are currently out don't contain cameras and don't do facial recognition. That was the biggest thing that made us different from these other commercially available products and kills our advantage.
API.AI got bought out by google. I am not a fan of google. I like my privacy a bit much and after learning more about the harvesting of personal data that is done by google, I have quit using their services. Their purchase of API.AI also leads back to point 2. If anyone is going to be requested to provide information to a government source, it is going to be google, and the use of services that they provide will then force those who base products off of their services to by default also have to provide this information.
The market for this type of product has become difficult because of the huge players in this market now. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and IBM would be my main competition along with the main services that I would use. This becomes a loosing fight quickly simply because there is no way that I can compete against all of these players. Add to this that a almost all of these companies are now cooperating with each other to further these types of functions, I seriously can no longer compete.
It would be one thing for me to put together something that I can use and handle the costs associated with my use. It becomes something quite different to make a product used by others. Developers normally can establish relationships that allow the API's that I used to be used without cost. Once you publish these for others to use, there are costs. The DIY community tries to keep costs as low as possible, which I totally understand and do the same thing. There are not a lot of people willing to pay for monthly for an alexa type device that can be put into a robot. The cost would be about $25.00 a month, which now you can buy an amazon echo dot for $40.00 and have unlimited use of it (if you have a prime account which carries with it other advantages). I don't see the market being open like it was even 6 months ago.
Because of all of these reasons, I have turned my attention toward a virtual school that allows anyone to enjoy live broadcasts teaching EZ-Robot based topics initially. This will allow people to participate in the live shows via IRC, Mumble, Skype or phone. I have worked with Noah from altaspeed to get the streaming to the internet setup in a way that will allow people to enjoy the stream from Twitch, YouTube live, RTMP and others. I have two entertaining hosts to serve as hosts for the class and have the streaming figured out. I do have some equipment to purchase so that I have redundancy and very high quality sound for the videos. Really, sound is the most difficult part of the entire setup. I should have the studio setup by February and we will start producing some test shows at that time. We will be housing our content for 1 year on a cloud server at digitalocean.com. We will keep archives locally also. I am currently working on getting a kodi channel up and running and testing other steaming services like scaleengine and ustream to see what they can offer that I cant do myself.
Students who buy the classes would be able to participate in the classroom conversations and be able to also get access to previously recorded classes. We will also start a show which will delve more into non-EZ-Robot specific topics with robotics. There would be news segments, product reviews, answers to questions and other things. We would have guest speakers on to discuss topics as we found those who would be willing to participate. There are a few other ideas floating around in my head, but this is a good enough start. From there, we would do other classes on other topics that are used in robotics like 3D design and manufacturing, programming and Artificial Intelligence topics.
We plan on doing shows on what we have done with EZ-AI and how it works which will allow others to do the same thing that we did. It will probably be about 6 months before we will start broadcasting. We will be setting up a patreon page for those who want to assist in getting this off the ground.
I had a feeling when I saw the commercials for Google and Amazon's products and did not see anything from you by Christmas that things were not going well. I was using another free service that the link just went dead, I assume for much the same reasons. I was unaware of the retention laws you spoke of. That is scary. I hope and pray everything turns out well with your family, out of my 10 grandchildren, I have 2 that are autistic so I understand the challenges. Will talk more off line.
RichardZ