Google Alto Is "A Little Teachable Object" For Machine Learning
Google Creative Lab this week revealed a project called Alto. Alto by Google Creative Lab is a "teachable object using the Coral USB Accelerator." It's made to allow users to get a very basic handle on machine learning in a way that's adaptable to hardware projects of all sorts. The code and template for this project are all free for access.
ALTO stands for A Little Teachable Object. This is an open source AI experiment, according to the Google Creative Lab team, made from relatively easily accessible parts. Those parts include a Coral USB accelerator board at it's base. This tiny piece of electronics currently costs approximately $60 USD.
👋 Say hello to Alto – a teachable object using the Coral USB Accelerator!
An easy way to try adding on-device machine learning to your next hardware project. Make your own Alto and share your remixes using #mlwithalto.
Give it a go → https://t.co/Bq0htX10be#machinelearning pic.twitter.com/EdsmtTjNMw
— Google Developers (@googledevs) February 22, 2021
Users will work with TensorFlow for software TensorFlow is a a machine learning platform that makes the entire process open source and available to the masses. This project also makes use of Raspberry Pi which comes in a bunch of different configurations. The current least-expensive version of the Raspberry Pi 4 is $35 USD.
Once the user combines the hardware elements and sets up the software, the resulting "Alto" has a single button, arms, and a camera. Alto is able to "learn two classes of things." One arm raises when it recognizes one sort of object, and the other arm raises when it recognizes the other.
To access Alto by Google Creative Lab, head over to the Alto by Google Creative Lab page with Experiments with Google. There you'll find links to downloads for code and templates from Github. If you or anyone you know constructs and works with Alto, let us know! We'd love to see what you ultimately create – make with the remixes of all sorts!