Do It Yourself Artificial Intelligence
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This is a transcript of the talk I gave at Crowd Supply’s Teardown Conference.
Growing up, the free toys on the covers of magazines were made of plastic. They were cheap, and cheerful. Yet the last thirty years has reduced the price of computing to the point where cheap and cheerful plastic toys have been replaced by other things.
Around this time last year Google and Raspberry Pi did something rather intriguing. Together they packaged machine learning — the ability for your Raspberry Pi to think and reason — as a kit, and made it available free on the cover of a magazine.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the print run of the magazine sold out in hours. To be fair, it wasn’t exactly on the cover. They had to put it, and the magazine, into a box. But I guess it’s thought that counts..?
Based around the a Raspberry Pi HAT the kit enabled you to add voice interaction to your Raspberry Pi. Later in the year, Google made the same kit available through retail channels.
Google called it AIY Projects, that would be AIY for “artificial intelligence it yourself,” and the kit came with almost all the bits and pieces you’d need to build a Google Home style Voice Assistant using a Raspberry Pi. There was even a cardboard case for the project build which, after Google Cardboard, has become almost synonymous with Google’s in-house prototyping efforts.
Then, towards the end of last year they announced the second AIY Projects Kit, this time it was a Vision rather than a Voice Kit. The contents looked familiar to anyone that’s played with the original Voice Kit, but this time the kit was based around a Raspberry Pi pHAT — better known as a Pi Bonnet .
Designed to work with the lower powered Raspberry Pi Zero instead of relying on the horse power of the Raspberry Pi’s 3 faster processor — the new kit moved a lot of the processing power it needs onto the Vision board itself, and the Intel Movidius chip on top hints at the biggest departure from the original Voice Kit.
