back to article First cardboard goggles, now this: Google's cardboard 'DIY AI' box powered by an RPi 3

In what can be taken either as cloud platform rainmaking or continued refusal to take hardware seriously, Google has introduced AIY Projects, do-it-yourself endpoints of spit and string for jacking into the Chocolate Factory's brain candy machine. The first such project, Voice Kit, promises artificial intelligence – a term …

  1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    "the AIY Projects website"

    And a very odd site it is too. With NoScript it displays nothing at all. Nowt. Zilch. Nada. So I didn't trouble them any further. Any business that treats potential customers with such disrespect soesn't deserve actual customers.

  2. Captain DaFt

    So far, the corporate definition of AI seems to be tending toward voice activation/speech recognition, data sorting algorithms, or just whatever software Facebook/Microsoft/Google/Oracle/etc. has being developed for them since 2010.

    The end result will be that when someone actually does build an AI, they'll have to invent a new name for it because the old one's been corrupted by marketing to mean fek all.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      It's the "disappointing" part of the hype cycle

      Silicon Valley types have finally figured out that every technology that gets overhyped will quickly enter a Disappointment phase. In the old days companies would tough it out and see if there was eventually daylight on the other side. These days, they just take whatever they have and re-label that as the thing that was promised, declare victory, and move on to the next round of VC funding.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: It's the "disappointing" part of the hype cycle

        That's some weapons-grade cynicism AC. I love it.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: It's the "disappointing" part of the hype cycle

        So it's like neocon-inspired nationbuilding. We just need to find the translations of constructions like "the surge", "only a training mission", "watching it grow and hoping to control it", "dumping containers full of weapons to ensure success", "no boots on the ground" and "we stand down as they stand up".

      3. Mage Silver badge

        Re: It's the "disappointing" part of the hype cycle

        It's like 3D TVs (actually Stereoscopic) and LED TVs (actually LCD), except real prototype 3D displays existed (not just holographic, but tilted spinning ground glass in a tube) and real LED displays exist, yet NONE of these speech interfaces actually use AI. They are Voice to Text and huge databases + algorithm.

        Maybe someone will figure out real AI, but this is not it. This is 20 year old tech with a better database and cheaper hardware.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Captain DaFt once typed: "So far, the corporate definition of AI seems to be tending toward voice activation/speech recognition, data sorting algorithms, or just whatever software Facebook/Microsoft/Google/Oracle/etc. has being developed for them since 2010."

      Good point, it's a bit like voice controlled automation, you could replace the voice input with a button and have it do the same function, less any voice specific contextual processing/output. The AI we are waiting for is a system with open-ended input and contextual output so fantastic, you'd think naked angel babies had brought it to you from another dimension. Right now the various so-called AIs of the world can do very little, but the voice recognition in most cases is good. Google Voice is my favorite example; it's doing voice to text translations (sometimes badly, but it tries) without any training on the user's part. Siri is nice, but you must train it to recognize your own voice. Good for security, a pain when you get a new device and have to talk to it before playing. In the end though, they do very little after the voice recognition is over with. I have spoken to Siri twice in my life and both times she failed and just did a keyword search. When I say; tell me how to do a screenshot, it should figure that out and just say "hit the home and power buttons, guy" but it could not figure that out. I get it; Siri does appointments, voice calling, and a couple of other things... things that are pre-built and crafted before hand. I need her to do more random things before I qualify her as a AI. Again, that's just voice input automation. Very little is being figured out by the "AI" backend. And when I can do those tasks faster without having to talk to a less than full featured assistant, that is telling.

      Anyway, Google is on the right with this DIY effort. Just let us poke at the AI and do our own local customizations, feeds, displays, etc without having adverts sprayed at us, or not being able to cut off the upstream data slurping, if we feel like using it privately. I don't see any downsides to this little project, other than not having control of the hardware once their OS or service is running on it, and the aforementioned lack of real AI features in the return data from the call to the mama cloud AI API.

      1. Neil Barnes Silver badge
        Terminator

        Well, indeed.

        I want an AI that can look at the windows I have open and make sense of them, e.g.:

        "hey, take that block of cells from the spreadsheet that define my state machine table and turn it into a C array, complete with all the squiggly bits in place and some sane comments, please."

        Yes, I know I can code something to do that, but that's rather the point, isn't it: an AI to be more than a gimmick requires a lot of free context as well as the intelligence to know what to do with it. The task itself isn't difficult; understanding what the task is, is.

  3. John Geek

    Pixel has sold poorly? odd. Pixel is backordered at many vendors, they can't make them fast enough. Numerous online review sites declare it the best Android phone ever.

    1. Dave 126 Silver badge

      Google just didn't make that many. Demand outstripped supply for a while, but that's also true of Ferraris. Perhaps Google were cautious, knowing that the phone's standout feature - its camera performance - was implemented in software on top of the same sort of Sony sensor every high-end phone uses.

  4. Your alien overlord - fear me

    You think the Nexus phones sold badly?

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Google needs to fix Google first ...

    Searches are becoming slower (i.e. it takes longer to find what you wanted in amongst the shite) and more dense (i.e. excluded words still seem get snuck back into the results).

    Apart from that, carry on.

    1. DropBear

      Re: Google needs to fix Google first ...

      Not to mention there ought to be a checkbox to tell them not to return the first ten thousand results from different pages of the exact same website considering none of them are actually relevant to my search and one single hit per site would be quite sufficient for me to ascertain that...

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Starting to lose count of all the failed Google projects

    I used to respect the company. They should just sling ads and make money and stop with all the half-baked nonsense.

    They don't realize it, but one of these days some new startup is going to do search a lot better, and they are going to lose half their market share overnight. Too bad they don't put any effort into sprucing up their nearly 20-year-old search interface.

    1. Ian Michael Gumby
      Boffin

      @Andy Prough ... Re: Starting to lose count of all the failed Google projects

      Haven't you heard?

      Fail Early and Fail Often?

  7. Mark York 3 Silver badge
    Coat

    AI In A Box = Box From Star Cops.

    http://blog.drewprops.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/2013_starcops_002.jpg

    Orac came a close second, but lost out for the simple reason of portability.

    Icon = Which pocket is the bloody thing in.

    1. graeme leggett Silver badge

      Re: AI In A Box = Box From Star Cops.

      I see your Box but raise you with Blakes 7 episode Gambit wherein Robert Holmes (and let's face it, if anyone can, he could) comes up with Orac's previously unmentioned ability to reduce size.

      Sufficient enough for Vila and Avon to take Orace with them into a space casino to cheat at cards, chess etc

      1. Mark York 3 Silver badge
        Thumb Up

        Re: AI In A Box = Box From Star Cops.

        I'd forgotten about that "single shot" ability.

        Have a thumbs up for kudos to RH.

    2. kmac499

      Re: AI In A Box = Box From Star Cops.

      Shurely this should read

      AI In A (Cardboard) Box = Box From Star Cops.

      BBC props team at their best. blinky lights with a voice over.

  8. Potemkine Silver badge

    GSA

    The demo I saw of the Google Search Appliance were impressive, but the price was sadly way to high for a SME

    1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

      Re: GSA

      Customer has had it for years and even if you spend very little time on customisation, it does an excellent job. It's being replaced by an SaaS which more or less makes sense once you realise they were black boxes always under Google's control. SaaS should give Google more pricing power so that the service can be offered to SMEs as well as corporates.

  9. Charlie Clark Silver badge
    Stop

    Google and hardware

    Google's relationship with hardware, apart from Chromebooks and Chromecasts, has not gone very well.

    Complete nonsense: Google designs its own data centres and has even ventured into chip design.

    If you mean consumer hardware then you have a point but many of Google's products have always looked liked limited issue trials to test the market. It consistently shies away from the consumer market why all the while testing AI-backed CRM solutions.

    The "maker" projects like Cardboard and this show that Google has a reasonable understanding of the tinkerers. What to get into VR but can't afford one of the expensive and soon to be obsolete kits? Then stick a phone in one of the Cardboard kits. Want to try your hand at speech recognition? Then try this. I personally think it's a great idea.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    This one I prefer

    https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/310865303/movi-a-standalone-speech-recognizer-shield-for-ard

    No spyware required.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    Why I feel uncomfortable...

    ... in putting electric-powered stuff which can overheat or the like, inside a flammable container?

    Maybe there's a reason why most Pi owners never built cardboard cases?

    1. Dave 126 Silver badge

      Re: Why I feel uncomfortable...

      Plastics like ABS will burn too - but burning cardboard is easier to brush off your skin than burning ABS or nylon.

      I don't know how hot RPis get, but I've heard of no injuries from them. Given they are marketed at youngsters and sold without a case, it would be a massive design failure if they did hot enough to cause injury. Of course, chip temperature isn't the only fire hazard - higher temperatures can occur locally on short circuits (perhaps if a child dips the microUSB power connector in liquid before plugging it in) but it would take an unlikely placement of dry fluff (tinder) for that to cause any sort of risk to the user.

      In short, the soldering iron offers orders of magnitude greater risk, and even then burning your fingers is an educational experience!

      But hey, it's better to start out paranoid (and design out or eliminate risks) than it is to be blasé. :)

    2. Francis Boyle Silver badge

      Re: Why I feel uncomfortable...

      The Pi can get hot but no hotter than a pizza straight from the oven which is why I built a Pi cluster in a Domino's pizza box*.

      *This is, of course, not true. I wouldn't be seen dead with a Domino's Pizza Box. Someone might think I eat the stuff.

    3. Charlie Clark Silver badge

      Re: Why I feel uncomfortable...

      Correctly handled* and wood is more fire resistant than concrete* which is why there's an uptick in wooden houses.

      * obviously not Pudding Lane.

      ** actually it's when the steel in concrete melts that the fun really starts.

  12. Gavin Chester
    Meh

    Let me fix that last line...

    For the lazy or time-constrained, the kit could bought through UK retailers Asda, Sainsbury's, Tesco, and WH Smith but all the kits have now all been bought up and are being sold on Ebay for inflated prices.

  13. himoverthere

    Picked mine up from WH Smith this morning. Plenty in stock in there. Just have to look. Given their size, the shops can't put too many on the shelves so ask behind the counter.

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