Category Archives: Internet Of Things

The Voice-Controlled, Face Recognizing, Drone Journey – Part 8

Introduction to the Drone Journey

Speech to Text

This post is the eighth post in documenting the steps I went through on my journey to build an autonomous, voice-controlled, face recognizing drone. There are 7 other posts building up to this one which you can find at the end of this post.

Focus of this post

We have come a long way from when we first started with a drone controlled from the computer. In the last post we spent time understanding how to use the Bing Speech API to convert supplied text to speech. In this post we will:

  • Show how you can use the Bing Speech API to derive text from speech.
  • Integrate that approach into our DroneWebServer.js web application and front end HTML so that we can control the drone via speech.

Continue reading The Voice-Controlled, Face Recognizing, Drone Journey – Part 8

The Voice-Controlled, Face Recognizing, Drone Journey – Part 7

Introduction to the Drone Journey

Text to Speech

This post is the eighth post in documenting the steps I went through on my journey to build an autonomous, voice-controlled, face recognizing drone. There are 7 other posts building up to this one which you can find at the end of this post.

Focus of this post

This post is going to make use of another of the APIs offered by Microsoft Cognitive Services – the Bing Speech API. Back in post 4, seems a long time ago now, I explained how to sign up for the various services and get the API key.

You will need to go back now and ensure you copy the BING Speech API key as we will use that in our next steps.

By the end of this post we will have the drone speaking to us when it lands.

Continue reading The Voice-Controlled, Face Recognizing, Drone Journey – Part 7

The Voice-Controlled, Face Recognizing, Drone Journey – Part 6

Introduction to the Drone Journey

Face Recognition

This post is the seventh post in documenting the steps I went through on my journey to build an autonomous, voice-controlled, face recognizing drone. There are 6 other posts building up to this one which you can find at the end of this post.

Focus of this post

In this post I am going to pick-up where we left off and look at :

  • How to use the Microsoft Cognitive Services Face API to recognize a specific face. Specifically we will explore the face.identify approach.
  • How to build the identify approach into your DroneWebServer.js file such that the drone will land when it sees a named person.

My issues

I have to admit to facing quite some challenges getting face.identify to work. Using the face.identify capability requires a large number of things to be completed, in a very specific order, before it will work.

Node.js does not make doing things in a specific order easy without nested functions, callbacks and other things.  The truth is that I wasted a large number of hours before I realized that the asynchronous nature of node.js was a major source of many of  the issues I was  running into rather than me misusing the Cognitive Services APIs o any issue with the APIs themselves.

I also found that the online examples sometimes do not really give you the step by step help you might need. this looked to mostly be the case in the Node.JS world as other programming languages  seemed much more comprehensive. In the node.js world you essentially get the code to look at and try to understand which does not help with “ordering” issues.

When you add to that it is entirely possible to create things, people for example, with the same name multiple times (without realizing it) you can see where my issues came from.

I did speak with Lukas again at this stage. He told me that he set up his target faces using the SDK console rather than through code so I hit a dead end there as I was determined to try avoid that (I must admit I thought about it ;)..).

This is where my first outreach to someone at Microsoft came. I contacted Chris Thrasher who very kindly sent me some code samples he had worked on. He too found the challenge of things not being called in order which he solved using the “bluebird” package.

Thanks to his pointer and his sample code I identified a spot I was not doing something right which allowed me to move forwards.  I want to be sure to say thanks to Chris because without his help I would have stopped at face.similar.

A warning: This is a monster blog post. I decided to put it all in one rather than break it up. Grab a coffee, give yourself sometime and enjoy the ride!

Continue reading The Voice-Controlled, Face Recognizing, Drone Journey – Part 6

The Voice-Controlled, Face Recognizing, Drone Journey – Part 5

Introduction to the Drone Journey

Part 5

This post is the sixth post in documenting the steps I went through on my journey to build an autonomous, voice-controlled, face recognizing drone. There are 5 other posts building up to this one which you can find at the end of this post.

Focus of this post

In this post I am going to pick-up where we left off and look at :

  • How we can make use of the Microsoft Cognitive Services Face API to recognize a specific face.  We will explore one of the approaches to doing that which reflects the journey I went through in this blog and the next blog will look at another approach.

Continue reading The Voice-Controlled, Face Recognizing, Drone Journey – Part 5

The Voice-Controlled, Face Recognizing, Drone Journey – Part 4

Introduction to the Drone Journey

Cognitive Services

This post is the fourth post in documenting the steps I went through on my journey to build an autonomous, voice-controlled, face recognizing drone. There are 4 other posts building up to this one which you can find at the end of this post.

Focus of this post

In this post I am going to pick-up where we left off and cover how you can:

  • Install the packages you need to access Microsoft Cognitive Services from node.js
  • Understand some of the capabilities of Microsoft Cognitive Services
  • Start to see how the face API can be used from node.js
  • Understand how to use the ImageMagick library (thanks to the tip from Lukas) to annotate the images that come back with the faces in node.js

Adding Intelligence To The Drone

In this part of the project we start to add some intelligence to our drone. We will do that using Microsoft Cognitive Services. There is a great introduction in this YouTube video which I encourage you to take a look at.

For this demo the primary APIs we will use are the Face API and the Speech APIs so I will focus there over the next few posts.

Continue reading The Voice-Controlled, Face Recognizing, Drone Journey – Part 4