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.
Hey Mel, I authorized your user. You should be able to log in now.
Thanks!
Here is an update just to prepare people for a change in the way that EZ-AI will work with the new release...
The way EZ-AI will work going forward is that there would be a small server placed on your network. It would contain all of the code that connects to the outside world for information, and would be the part that does the majority of the work with EZ-AI. The client would be installed on the machine that runs ARC. This not only protects the code, but allows a much smaller client computer to be used in the robot that is running EZ-AI.
We have tested clients with machines as small as a Raspberry Pi and it has performed extremely well which shows how light weight the client is. This is because the work is done on the server, which is a small single board computer also. Depending on the size of the installation (how many clients are used at the same time) the server might need to be larger. We are going to be conducting tests to get an idea of how the server/client count configuration should be.
Using a CochranRobotics configured EZ-AI server will also remove a lot of the headaches associated with installing EZ-AI. Right now, the Client listens for the words "Hey Rafiki" (which we will make configurable) and then gets the spoken words after these words, and sends them to the server for processing. The client waits for the response back and then decides what to do with the information that is returned to it. If it is a command, it will pass it along to ARC. This would be something like "Bring this to David.". If it is information or an audio stream, it would play that audio stream or speak the information. Most of what EZ-AI does is informative. We will be working on adding an option to allow either the audio to be returned or for the text for the audio to be returned to the client. I cant spring this new wrinkle on my dev guys until after the 22nd though but it will be one of the final things that we need to add to the server.
The server will allow multiple clients to access it. The costs associated with the services used by EZ-AI are all dependent on the number of requests to these services. The server will track the number of uses per month for your installation and will not allow you to go beyond the number of uses that the user has paid for for the features that cost us money to use. The first X number of uses each month will be no charge, which will allow you to run a limited number of EZ-AI external service type requests a month. This is about the only way to have EZ-AI have a free version still because of the advances services that we are now using for speech type things and for information from external services.
Costs will be determined shortly, but it is dependent on the number of requests not only by you but by everyone using these services. The more requests, the lower the cost per request goes... This makes it very difficult to estimate.
There will be an initial cost for the server that will be sold on CochranRobotics.com. This cost will be to cover the cost of the server hardware dependent on the size of the installation. The question will be asked, what if we want to run this on our own hardware? At this time, we won't be offering that option. By allowing us to do the hardware installation and ship you a working product, you will have fewer headaches and a much better end user experience. Also, we have to protect our code because we are using services that cost money for us to use. If we simply posted the code for use, the billing wouldn't be able to be setup and we would take a huge hit on pirated software. We are working on ways to stop the software from running in the event of theft right now which is something that we didn't have to worry about with previous versions of the software.
Welcome to the world of online authentication of license keys... The server will access a license server over the internet, which will allow your key to be validated against a database of keys. This will happen once a day and the EZ-AI server will work for that day. The local server will report back to the verification server the number of uses for the paid for services for that day. This will allow us to do billing from a different secured server. This is all a pain but it is really the only way to offer the advanced features that we are offering, and protect ourselves financially.
A lot said, but I just wanted to prepare people for a completely different approach to this product.
This sounds great David. Thanks for the very informative update, very interesting. With the new setup and making it easier to instal, I will deffinatly look in to having a go at this for future projects.
It sounds like you have assembled a great team, and I look forward to seeing the new EZ-AI in action. Great work.
David
I tried to log on to your website to get more information on Rafiki but could not register, not sure if you are trying to limit the e-mail traffic. I am very interested in this project and hopefully you will be able to bring it to fruition, so count me in.
Regards
Hector
Hector,
I will check the website when I get to a location that I can. The admin side of the site isn't very smart phone friendly.
Authorizations given to the site.
David that's a lot of work you've been doing please keep us informed with both