by Paul Cohen | Sep 13, 2017 | Blog, Cognitive Technology, Music, Technology, VR |
The sound and music are 50% of the entertainment in a movie. George Lucas
As it is in games, I would also say the same for emerging mediums such as VR, AR, and MX.
I’ve been working recently on a couple of projects related to a few different areas, such as:
As part of this, last week I presented an introductory tutorial at the VRHubTokyo Meetup on Spatial Audio in Unity3D.
This is a really interesting area, with a lot of challenges still to be overcome.
This panel video of immersive audio experts is an excellent introduction to a lot of the issues:
We also had another Canvas Tokyo Musicians Meetup where we discussed a few of these topics, among others.
You can read the event report here: Musicians Meetup #2 Event Report – Mon 11th Sept @ Tacchi Studios
Check out the Spatial Music Visualizer which I also used to discuss a few of the issues around spatial music.
Stay tuned for more news soon!
by Paul Cohen | Feb 23, 2017 | Blog, chatbot, Cognitive Technology |
Chatbot development and deployment
There’s a lot of hype at the moment about AI in general, and chatbot’s being the next big “app market”. Reality is the tech is still very immature and there are not a lot of use cases where the chatbot workflow is a better UX than simple point and click with a well defined menu and information architecture.
FAQ’s are an important corner of the customer support sector and is one area where they may have use so I decided to test out Microsoft’s bot service, which is still in preview mode: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/bot-service/
I created an FAQ chatbot for one of my own products as a practical test, which you can see running live here: http://www.harpninja.com/wp/faqhelp/
As you can see from the image there’s quite a bit to it, architecturally and technology wise, with a number of different services from NLU (Natural Language Understanding) to the bot development to connecting various user touchpoint services. There are a number of different types of bots you can implement and an FAQ bot is best implemented using another service they have called https://qnamaker.ai
Overall it’s a pretty nice developer workflow considering the different services they have hooked up to make the development and deployment a relatively painless experience. This FAQ chatbot is using their inbuilt web chat preview which made it a snap to integrate into WordPress without having to code up a plugin. The bot has also been deployed to Skype, Slack, and Facebook Messenger.
There’s a lot of different options for developing chatbots, which this article gives a great overview of: https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/bots-what-you-need-to-know , but I would definitely recommend Microsoft (the new Apple!).
by Paul Cohen | May 24, 2016 | Blog, Cognitive Technology, Data Science, Strategy, Technology |
“I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that” HAL 9000
Cognitive Technology, Smart Apps, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence…the list of new technology buzz goes on and on.
But what do they actually mean?
Cognitive Technology Infographic
Here’s an infographic to help explain what Cognitive Technology is and how it can be applied for business use.
The use cases are many and varied, depending on your business needs.
- Expert systems
- Autonomous vehicle control on Land. Sea, and Air
- Robotics
- Sales and inventory forecasting
- Price modeling
- Image, video, and handwriting recognition
- Text and document analysis for classification, concept, and sentiment extraction
- Customer segmentation and market analysis
- Social network analysis for brand and product affinity
- Anomaly detection for fraud and other behavior patterns
There are also many vendors in this space ranging from the big 4
- IBM
- Microsoft
- Google
- Amazon
to many smaller players focused on providing different levels of service.
Enjoy!
Image Credit: Evolution by Jakob Vogel from the Noun Project
Cognitive Technology Quickstart Infographic
