Yes! Fantastic news! Btw my wife loves the bible inclusion and already wants my project to start reading scripture

I can only think the sky's the limit with additional help. I have a few ideas about what we talked about. I'll shoot you an email over the weekend!

I look forward to it. We need to get this installed for you soon. You can tell her that it gets recipes also, but you might get hurt...

Talk to you soon Will

Lol your right! Frying pan to the head, bugs bunny style. Seriously she loves that too.

The new house is full of boxes but working on getting the office together this weekend . I should have my Mac Pro ( running windows ) up and running soon. I'm off to Los Angeles Sunday thru Thursday. So let's try to install shortly after that.

Sounds great. shoot me what you have for me this weekend. I will be around. Talk to you later!

The next release of EZ-AI is going to be delayed a bit. I have brought on one more developer at this time. I am allowing him to have time to review the code and make recommendations to changes to the code. He is refactoring some items and commenting all of the code (because I am horrible at documenting things in code). This will take a bit of time but will make for a better product in the long run. Version 1.0.0.7 will focus mainly on measuring distance using camera(s). Version 1.0.0.8 is slated to include the limited self learning and information association module.

In designing the limited self learning module, and in conversations with the other programmer, we have a couple of ideas but I don't know which way we want to go with this yet, so I am throwing it out for suggestions. First, the self learning module will work like this. When someone asks the Web Query section of EZ-AI a question like say "Who is George Washington?" the web query will return something like "George Washington was the first President of the United States of America." We would store this information and then parse it, and submit searches on the important words in the return. This would be done at night or when the robot isn't actively being used by allowing the user to pass a variable to EZ-AI to tell it to start learning. This parsing would find President United States and America. It would then perform searches for these words or phrases. The results of these searches would be stored and more searches would be performed based on these results. The end result would be that the robot would then know that George Washington is a leader who had ties to all of the other Presidents of the United States of America. This would allow the robot to be much smarter and gather more information about the topics that interest a user so that future searches for information and related topics could come from the database instead of the internet.

Here is where the question comes in. If this information were shared from all of the users into one centralized database, the data would be able to grow more complete and more quickly. If after your robot performed these searches, it synced its data to a central database, and was allowed to get data from this centralized database, it would allow your robot to have massive amounts of information. It would also store the questions and responses that you got back from the questions you asked. This part could be a bit of a concern for some. User information wouldn't be gathered as to who asked what question, but some like their privacy and I understand that this could make some uneasy. Not syncing data to a centralized location wouldn't mean that you couldn't use EZ-AI. You just wouldn't call the sync process.

Your thoughts or concerns here would be greatly appreciated as I do want to know them. I don't want to put something out that would make others uncomfortable. Please share...

@d.cochran First I spun up the VM Server 2008 r3 and a 2012 r2 but have not gotten into the install portion. Something about the wife wanting me to pay attention to her. I don't get that part. I wish I cold find her power down button.

You pose an interesting dilemma. With all the virtual assistant's popping up i.e. Siri, Cortana, never ending JARVIS, ect . . . I personally do not want the dependency of a "Central Collective Database". Although it poses the ability to learn a vast amount of general knowledge I would rather have my own offline assistant that learns a personal skill set from me since it is there to serve me. I would not mind the ability to download a "specialized packet(s) of knowledge" from a central collective server occasionally based on an immediate need or desire.

It's a problem for me to call this a "Cloud" since I have been flying for 30 years and never have flown into or by a data cloud.

Just my thoughts

I'm up for a centralized data base, as I believe cloud robotics will accelerate the AI. Plus I think you should name it Skynet.. Oh wait I think that websites been taken by google

Seriously, I think it's the future of robotics. One for central database.

The plan is to allow the user to set if they want to sync their data or not. Enabling the sync will allow the user to pull information from the central database also. This would only be used in certain parts of EZ-AI. This is an important feature for the retail side of this project, but will first be programmed for use by the community. A robot that could relate items to each other in retail could be a powerful tool. Not everyone would want their database of products shared with everyone else but they would want to be able to share this information between their branches. This poses an interesting dilemma for online storage of data. I know how to handle the security side of this, but the application has to be smart enough to handle things correctly.

The sync of this data would probably be handled through XML files. The knowledge that hasn't yet been shared would be exported to an XML file, and then FTP'ed to the central server, which would import the data when it saw a new XML file. Nightly, a dump of its knowledge would be made to an XML file, which would then be downloaded to the clients at their request. The EZ-AI client on your computer would load this data into its database when it saw a new XML file and the robot was in learning mode.

On another note, the other developer has experience using OpenCV which could be used to replace RoboRealm. This wouldn't happen anytime soon. I think it would be at least a year out before OpenCV would be incorporated and RoboRealm would be replaced. It would offer us some more abilities with the camera and would make it possible to fully control the camera functions from within EZ-AI.

The other developer is about to start classes on Machine Learning and AI platform development. He is very excited to use this project as a platform for his school projects. This helps him and helps EZ-AI a lot. He will be able to push the capabilities of EZ-AI far more than my business application type skillset. I am so happy to have him onboard. In six months, EZ-AI will have far more capabilities and would be able to make decisions based on the data that it has. I am studying up on Deep Learning and Neural Network programming and trying to decide where and how this should be implemented. It is a very interesting subject and we can leverage of of some work already in a framework called EnCog. It will get us going forward pretty quickly, but understanding something well enough to program for it takes time. Patience is a virtue that I sometimes don't have enough of. It's time to start learning about patience again...