Google AIY Kits are Launching in Hong Kong

Recently, it was reported that the Google AIY Kits will be launched in Hong Kong. Obviously, AIY Kits will help makers in Hong Kong jump on the AI bandwagon.

Artificial Intelligence allows computers to perform increasingly complex tasks like understanding speech or identifying what’s in an image.

AIY stands for “Do-it-yourself Artificial Intelligence”. In 2017, Google launched AIY projects to give makers the power to build AI into their projects with two do-it-yourself kits. With AIY Projects, Makers can use artificial intelligence to make human-to-machine interaction more like human-to-human interactions.

The Voice Kit lets you build a voice-controlled speaker, while the Vision Kit lets you build a camera that learns to recognize people and objects.

To make setup easier, both kits have been redesigned to work with the new Raspberry Pi Zero WH, which comes included in the box, and pre-provisioned SD card. Now users no longer need to download the software image and can get running faster. The updated AIY Vision Kit v1.1 also includes the Raspberry Pi Camera v2.

Google AIY Kits: Make Everyone Learn AI Easily

AIY Voice Kit

Voice Kit can let makers build a Voice User Interface (VUI) that can use cloud services (like the new Google Assistant SDK or Cloud Speech API) or run completely on-device. This project extends the functionality of the most popular single board computer used for digital making - the Raspberry Pi.

The speech recognition capability in AIY Voice Kit could be used to:

·Replace physical buttons and digital displays on household appliances and consumer electronics

·Replace smartphone apps to control devices on connected devices.

·Add voice recognition to assistive robotics (e.g. for accessibility) -- just talk to the robot as a simplified programming interface, e.g. "tell me what's in this room or "tell me when you see the mail-carrier come to the door"

Alternately, Developers can run Android Things on the Voice Kit with full functionality - making it easy to prototype Internet-of-Things devices and scale to full commercial products with several turnkey hardware solutions available (including Intel Edison, NXP Pico, and Raspberry Pi 3).

AIY Vision Kit

AIY Vision Kit is designed to work with the smaller Raspberry Pi Zero W computer and runs its vision algorithms on-device so there's no cloud connection required.

The kit materials list includes a Vision Bonnet, Raspberry Pi Zero WH, Raspberry Pi Camera v2,  SD card, a cardboard outer shell, an RGB arcade-style button, a piezo speaker, flex cables, standoffs, a tripod mounting nut and connecting components,etc.

The Vision Bonnet is an accessory board for Raspberry Pi Zero W that features the Intel® Movidius™ MA2450, a low-power vision processing unit capable of running neural networks. This will give makers visual perception instead of image sensing. It can run at speeds of up to 30 frames per second, providing near real-time performance.

Bundled with the software image are three neural network models:

A model based on MobileNets that can recognize a thousand common objects.

A model for face detection capable of not only detecting faces in the image, but also scoring facial expressions on a "joy scale" that ranges from "sad" to "laughing."

A model for the important task of discerning between cats, dogs and people.

For those who have their own models in mind, Google has included the original TensorFlow code and a compiler. Take a new model they have (or train) and run it on the the Intel® Movidius™ MA2450.

Google’s AIY Kits are launching in Hong Kong through online retailer Gravitylink on this site: https://store.gravitylink.com, and the price will be HK$706.00 and HK$ 392.00.