who said WPF is dead....

[Brennon Williams]

Hi all,

 

I wanted to share a video of my conversational AI solution.

 

http://www.brennonwilliams.com/blog/2016/5/16/developer-test-of-fluid-conversational-ai-system

 

What you see in this video is just a testing tool – a viewer sitting on the network picking up the internal AI messages. It’s written in WPF.

 

In fact, many of the videos I will release in the future will show the conversational UI and the DNA editing platform tool which are also written in WPF.

 

Why stick with WPF? It is not that I stuck with WPF, it is that I tried lots of other frameworks and languages and I kept getting blocked one way or another. I kept having to jump over sandbox security or some other issue that killed performance or just created a nightmare in maintainability.

 

In the end, as soon as I went back to WPF, the tool development just worked so smoothly with the underlying engine and allowed me to progress much faster.

 

 

I know most of you think I can’t code. And certainly I believe that you all (and many others) possess coding skills beyond my efforts. While I like to do lots of other things with design, robotics and electronics, I’ve been writing code near on 22 years now.

 

My focus is on the logic problems –really hard logic problems like cognition and intelligence.

 

So before anyone writes WPF off as some old technology (sort of like me I guess), I just hope people see that it can and will play a significant roll in what is arguably the future of technology.

[Colin Eberhardt]

Nice job!

Learning to code is easy, it's learning how to design and foster creativity - those are the hard parts.

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[Peter O'Hanlon]

Cool stuff. I will be having a look at this tonight. I have to say, I have always given you props for your coding skills so I have high expectations.

For desktop development, I have to agree. I never left the WPF love and find I can do things with it that are excessively prohibitive in other environments.

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[Sacha Barber]

Big circle control looks fun

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[Brennon Williams]

;-) Yeah took only a few minutes to throw that bad boy together. As I said, it’s just a testing viewer so we could actually see what was being executed inside the engine at runtime.

[Brennon Williams]

Thanks Pete. I hope I don’t disappoint. My expectations are probably even higher.

 

From: wpf-di...@googlegroups.com [mailto:wpf-di...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Peter O'Hanlon
Sent: 17 May 2016 08:08
To: wpf-di...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [WPF Disciples] who said WPF is dead....

 

Cool stuff. I will be having a look at this tonight. I have to say, I have always given you props for your coding skills so I have high expectations.

[Laurent Bugnion]

“anyone writes WPF off as some old technology”

 

That would be silly considering that there are quite a few things that only WPF can do. UWP is not there yet.

 

Btw a lot of live for WPF at the Xamarin Evolve keynote recently. They have this new feature called Workbooks which allows you to write a markdown document (for training, teaching, documentation etc…) and add some C# snippets. This is all Roslyn powered. Full intellisense support, and you can create workbooks in Android, iOS and…… WPF!! The demo they showed was using a 3D framework running a cool animation of planet earth and satellites.

 

I loved it so much that while on the plane I modified a WPF talk I was going to give the next week. It was very successful. I am going to give an extended version of the WPF talk (75 minutes) at VSLive in Boston and Redmond and I am very impatient. It turns out to be a really nice talk.

 

Take care

Laurent

 

 

Sent from my Windows 10 phone

[Colin Eberhardt]

Just watched the video, it's really cool. We've been looking at text-based conversational interfaces within the financial domain recently. One of my colleagues is talking about the subject at a few UX conferences this year.

Certainly a hot topic at the moment.

From my limited experience of the subject it looks like natural language parsing is easy, as is mapping text to intent, and speech synthesis is easy too. All are commoditised, with a range of APIs available.

However, creating a compelling conversation, where the 'bot' maintains the context of the conversation, looks like a real challenge. Most bots I have interacted with fail quite badly at this point. You often have to adapt the way you interact with them to match their internal view of how the conversation should progress. Unfortunately, as they do not publish this as a flow diagram, this is a painful process!

Your hotel bot seems to have quite a rich understanding of context, you can see it learning (or at least remembering) as the conversation progresses. Exciting stuff!

On Tue, May 17, 2016 at 8:00 am, Brennon Williams <brennon...@x-coders.com> wrote:

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[Laurent Bugnion]

Very cool video Brennon. That’s a fascinating area for sure.

 

Laurent

 

 

Sent from my Windows 10 phone

 

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[Brennon Williams]

“Context” is a really interesting part, and you are on the right track when identifying it as a key challenge.

 

When you add some other really complex concepts such as tangential conversations, the standard approach to maintaining context fails.

 

The ripple effect of the logic issues propagate and break the intelligence – while the engine keeps working, the responses don’t make any sense.

 

Tangential context combined with multiple users (each with emotional context), multiple inputs all simultaneously being processed is a very deep level of the rabbit hole. It is sometimes overwhelming to make even the smallest change without breaking the logic.

 

The demo shown in the video really is just a very small part of the engine. Am gearing up to show some really crazy stuff ;-)

 

Cheers Colin.

[Brennon Williams]

Hi Laurent, thanks so much for the shout out on twitter.

 

You can also let folks know, that your MVVM Light solution underpins the ILI messaging system! Which is just awesome. (The viewer only shows a few hundred a second velocity – but in truth, inside the engine it is sometimes gets closer to 2K/second!)

 

Cheers

 

From: Laurent Bugnion [mailto:lau...@galasoft.ch]
Sent: 17 May 2016 08:24
To: Brennon Williams <brennon...@x-coders.com>; wpf-di...@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: [WPF Disciples] who said WPF is dead....

 

Very cool video Brennon. That’s a fascinating area for sure.

 

Laurent

 

 

Sent from my Windows 10 phone

 

From: Brennon Williams

Sent: Tuesday, May 17, 2016 9:01
To: wpf-di...@googlegroups.com

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[Corrado Cavalli]

Impressive Brennon, love the voice J

WPF is alive and kicking, probably more than UWP at the moment J

 

Cheers!

/C

 

From: wpf-di...@googlegroups.com [mailto:wpf-di...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Brennon Williams
Sent: martedì 17 maggio 2016 09:00
To: wpf-di...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [WPF Disciples] who said WPF is dead....

 

Hi all,

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[Brennon Williams]

Thanks Corrado – and thanks so much for the retweet!

 

I hope you are well my friend.

 

Cheers

[Daniel Vaughan]

Very cool, Brennon. I realize the technology is in the role playing and flexibility, but what speech recognition technology are you using? It appears to be fairly resilient to conversational idiosyncrasies.

Cheers,

Daniel

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Daniel Vaughan

Principal Consultant, Outcoder Sàrl

Microsoft MVP | +41 79 839 54 40

http://www.outcoder.com | http://danielvaughan.org

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[Brennon Williams]

Hi Daniel, how are you!

 

Unfortunatley the speech recognition part is only the start of the challenges.

 

We are using a hybrid combination of a few local and cloud speech recognition solutions to achieve this. ILI switches between them and or combines the results, depending on the scenario. This also means ILI can work with or without an internet connection.

 

ILI will then “fix” grammatical and context issues in the pre-NLP pipeline to build more robustness into the conversation process which is where the resilience comes from.

 

So for example, while the speech result at the start may be “I won’t wake up call” – by the time ILI is extracting the intent, it is processing against “I want a wake up call”, which is a fairly significant difference.

 

The challenge with speech is always the microphones though – a beamforming array microphone really cleans up the input.

 

Take care,

 

Cheers

[Karl Shifflett]

Wow, you're shooting for the stars with this very impressive product!

Best to you always,

Karl

[Marlon Grech]

Impressive stuff dude! Really awesome !

 

I think just like touch was getting hot and trendy few years ago, AI is the next big thing IMO and definitely what you have hear is top notch. Really impressive stuff dude !

 

Sent from my Windows 10 phone

 

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[Pavan Podila]

Looks pretty awesome. AI is certainly the next frontier!

Thanks,

Pavan Podila

[Brennon Williams]

Hey thanks guys. It’s nice to be able to show some stuff after so many years of being in this stealth mode scenario.

 

Way more cooler stuff to come!

 

Cheers