about 7 years ago
Excited about AWS DeepLens and wondering how you might put it to use?
You can use AWS DeepLens to give Amazon Alexa the power to detect objects via Alexa skills!
People are using Alexa for all types of activities, such as checking their bank balances, ordering pizza, or simply listening to their music from their favorite artists. For the most part, the primary interaction with the Echo has been your voice. In this blog post, we’ll show you how to build a new Alexa skill that will integrate with AWS DeepLens so when you ask “Alexa, what do you see?” Alexa returns objects detected by the AWS DeepLens device.
Object detection is an important topic in the AI deep learning world. For example, in autonomous driving, the camera on the vehicle needs to be able to detect objects (people, cars, signs, etc.) on the road first before making any decisions to turn, slow down, or stop.
AWS DeepLens was developed to put deep learning in the hands of developers. It ships with a fully programmable video camera, tutorials, code, and pre-trained models. It was designed so that you can have your first Deep Learning model running on the device within about 10 minutes after opening the box. For this blog post we’ll use one of the built-in object detection models included with AWS DeepLens. This enables AWS DeepLens to perform real-time object detection using the built-in camera. After the device detects objects, it sends information about the objects detected to the AWS IoT platform.
We’ll also show you how to push this data into an Amazon Kinesis data stream, and use Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics to aggregate duplicate objects detected in the stream and push them into another Kinesis data stream. Finally, you’ll create a custom Alexa skill with AWS Lambda to retrieve the detected objects from the Kinesis stream and have Alexa verbalize the result back to the user. Pretty cool, right? Click here to learn more! And don’t forget, AWS Educate’s DeepLens Badge has 10-15 hours of content to expand your deep learning knowledge and skills. You’ll hear directly from professionals in this field, complete activities and review reference materials to learn more about DeepLens and how you can start using the device for projects or research.
Questions?
If you have any questions about the hackathon, please post on the discussion forum.