Categories
App Development AR / VR Cloud Speech Assistants

How-To: Convert Neural Voice Audio from Amazon Polly (mp3) to Spark AR (m4a)

Currently, Facebook’s Spark AR Studio is restrictive with supported audio formats. Unfortunately, only M4A with specific settings is allowed. This short tutorial is a guidance on how to convert artificially generated neural voices (in this case coming from an mp3 file as produced by Amazon Polly) to the m4a format accepted by Spark AR. I’m using the free Audiacity tool, which integrates the open-source FFmpeg plug-in.

Spark AR has the following requirements on audio files:

  • M4A format
  • Mono
  • 44.1 kHz sample rate
  • 16-bit depth

Generating Audio using Text-to-Speech (mp3 / PCM)

Neither Amazon Polly nor the Microsoft Azure Text-to-Speech cognitive service can directly produce an m4a audio file. In its additional settings, Polly offers MP3, OGG, PCM and Speech Marks. MP3 goes up to a sample rate of 24000 Hz, PCM is limited to 16000 Hz.

Categories
Cloud Events Speech Assistants

AWS IMAGINE: Accelerating Transformation in Education

As an unexpected catalyst, the COVID-19 pandemic drove rapid change in global education, including improved accessibility for some, affordability, and curricula aligned with job skills needed for the modern world.

Of course, cloud technologies play a fundamental role in the new world of teaching. In the global panel session by AWS, I’ll share insights about:

  • How remote students can solve a real-life wellbeing problem with a working prototype in just 10 days.
  • How learning and retention can be improved through the open-source Voice Learning Alexa skill.
Categories
App Development Artificial Intelligence Cloud

Computer Vision & Photo Description: Really Simple HTML / JavaScript Example

Image classification & content description is incredibly powerful. Cloud-based computer vision services instantly return a JSON-based description of what they see in photos.

However, most examples are quite complex. As a beginning developer with your main knowledge in HTML + JavaScript, the following code is for you. You don’t need to worry about Node.js or native apps. The code runs directly in your browser from your computer.

Categories
App Development Cloud

Node.js and Cloud NoSQL Databases: Azure Cosmos DB

Learn how to access a cloud-based NoSQL database from Node.js. The Azure Cosmos DB stores documents (e.g., JSON) and allows scaling for improved performance plus geo-redundancy with one click. The access interface also allows well-known SQL queries.

This guide uses the latest Azure Cosmos DB JavaScript module (released as final version just 17 days ago). Additionally, this article is based on the ES 2017 standard. The async / await syntax makes the code short and readable. In contrast to many other tutorials, this article focuses on the minimum code required to understand the concepts.

The complete source code of this article is available on GitHub.