AI - Expecting someone geekier

Jim Bennett

Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft, Xamarin Certified Developer, author of Xamarin In Action, blogger, speaker, father and lover of beer, whisky and Thai food. Opinions are my own.

Redmond, WA, USA
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Save your users from typing with AI 🤖

Featured Jim Bennett 21 Jul 2019 Technology, xamarin, xamarin.forms, AI, cognitive services, OCR, Text recognition

I've been playing a lot with the Azure Custom Vision Service - a great service to build image classification and object detection models with just a few images. To make it easier to test my models, I wanted to build a mobile app that connects to a custom vision project and uses that to classify or detect objects in images captured using the camera.…

Azure makers series

Featured Jim Bennett 14 Nov 2018 Technology, xamarin, azure, AI, cognitive services, azure free

I recently recorded a quick video to talk about an app I was building using the Azure free account. You can check it out here: If you want to see the code, it's in my GitHub repo here - https://github.com/jimbobbennett/AzurePhotoSharer…

Running AI models on iOS, Android and Windows using Xamarin

Featured Jim Bennett 20 Jul 2018 xamarin.forms, AI, windows, iOS, Android, onnx, nuget, technology, xamarin

I created a NuGet package a while ago to allow you to run models exported from the Azure Custom Vision service on iOS and Android in Xamarin apps from your cross-platform code. You can read about this here. Since then, the Custom Vision service has added ONNX export, meaning you can now run these models on-device on Windows as well. This meant it…

Running custom vision models on a Windows device

Featured Jim Bennett 20 Jul 2018 xamarin, technology, windows, custom vision, AI, onnx

Recently I wrote about creating AI models using the Azure Custom Vision Service. In these posts I looked at creating and training models, running them online, then finally exporting the models to run on iOS using CoreML and Android using TensorFlow. Recently Microsoft announced another way to export models - as ONNX models that can be run using Wi…

Describing a photo in a mobile app using Azure Computer Vision

Featured Jim Bennett 30 May 2018 xamarin, xamarin.forms, AI, computer vision

I recently gave an introduction to Xamarin talk at Imperial College, London and wanted to build a cool app to show off what you can do on mobile using the awesome Cognitive Services available on Azure. I only had about 30-40 minutes to not only introduce Xamarin, but build an app so I decided to throw together a simple app to take a photo and descr…

Face identification with Azure Cognitive Services Face API

Featured Jim Bennett 02 Mar 2018 xamarin, AI, azure, cognitive services, xamarin.forms, nuget, technology, api, faceapi

Recently I've been playing with a lot AI and seeing how it can be used in mobile apps to enhance the experience offered to the user. Currently I am playing with facial recognition using the Azure Cognitive Services Face API. This is a stupidly powerful API that can do a LOT of different things: Detect faces in images Analyze those faces to detect…

Identifying my daughters toys using AI - Part 5, Plugin for on-device models

Featured Jim Bennett 26 Feb 2018 xamarin, xamarin.ios, xamarin.android, xamarin.forms, Tensorflow, AI, CoreML, nuget, custom vision, cognitive services, azure, technology

In the first part of this series I used the Azure Custom Vision service to create an image classifier to allow me to easily identify my daughters cuddly toys. Once created I tested it by uploading an image and seeing what tags the classifier found for the image. In the second part I accessed this model from a Xamarin app, so that I could use the c…

Identifying my daughters toys using AI - Part 4, using the models offline on Android

Featured Jim Bennett 24 Jan 2018 xamarin.android, Android, xamarin, Tensorflow, AI, custom vision, cognitive services, azure

Identifying my daughters toys using AI - Part 3, using the models offline in iOS

Featured Jim Bennett 17 Jan 2018 technology, xamarin, AI, CoreML, azure, cognitive services, custom vision, Porg, Image classifier, iOS

Identifying my daughters toys using AI - Part 1, creating the model

Featured Jim Bennett 27 Dec 2017 azure, Technology, AI, cognitive services, Image classifier, Porg

Prefer to watch instead of read? - https://youtu.be/3sjInlJcpBs It's currently just after Christmas, and my 4 year old daughter has received a fair few cuddly toys from Santa. These bring her total collection up to way too many, and like most parents I have a hard time remembering all their names, especially the least favorite ones that rarely com…