Web-based voice command recognition

Posted on March 14, 2018 by Boris Smus

Last time we converted audio buffers into images. This time we’ll take these images and train a neural network using deeplearn.js. The result is a browser-based demo that lets you speak a command (“yes” or “no”), and see the output of the classifier in real-time, like this:

Curious to play with it, see whether or not it recognizes yay or nay in addition to yes and no? Try it out live. You will quickly see that the performance is far from perfect. But that’s ok with me: this example is intended to be a reasonable starting point for doing all sorts of audio recognition on the web. Now, let’s dive into how this works. Continue reading →

Audio features for web-based ML

Posted on March 6, 2018 by Boris Smus

One of the first problems presented to students of deep learning is to classify handwritten digits in the MNIST dataset. This was recently ported to the web thanks to deeplearn.js. The web version has distinct educational advantages over the relatively dry TensorFlow tutorial. You can immediately get a feeling for the model, and start building intuition for what works and what doesn’t. Let’s preserve this interactivity, but change domains to audio. This post sets the scene for the auditory equivalent of MNIST. Rather than recognize handwritten digits, we will focus on recognizing spoken commands. We’ll do this by converting sounds like this:

Into images like this, called log-mel spectrograms, and in the next post, feed these images into the same types of models that do handwriting recognition so well:

The audio feature extraction technique I discuss here is generic enough to work for all sorts of audio, not just human speech. The rest of the post explains how. If you don’t care and just want to see the code, or play with some live demos, be my guest! Continue reading →

Diving into IBM’s Quantum Experience through your Browser

Posted on June 6, 2016 by Abdelrahman Hosny

People tend to stay away when they hear the word “Quantum Computing”. The word itself gives the feeling that it targets scientists or physics researchers, but not your average person scrolling down in their newsfeed. However, quantum computing increasingly becomes more mature to kill its reputation as a hard field. Understanding quantum computing requires as much imagination as math or physics knowledge. In this post, I’m going to briefly spark your imagination about the next generation of computers and give you a glimpse of how IBM makes the experience accessible through your web browser; not access-restricted physics labs.

What is Quantum Computing?

Perhaps you are reading this blog post from your desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone. All of these devices run on a traditional computer (or what we call: classical computer). Every piece of tech gadget you are using nowadays uses the concepts of classical computing. But what are classical computers and how are they different from quantum computers? Continue reading →

Exascale computing: Why we need it and some of the challenges to conquer it.

Posted on May 26, 2016 by Vasileios Kalantzis

To introduce you to Exascale computing, as well as its challenges, we interviewed the distinguished Professor Jack Dongarra (University of Tennessee), an internationally renowned expert in high-performance computing and the leading scientist behind the TOP500 (http://www.top500.org/), a list which ranks supercomputers according to their performance.

Continue reading →