When we started Firebird Summit, we wanted to change the perception of what machine learning could be. We saw an industry that was not only evolving in how we use technology, but also changing what our world was capable of.

We see a technology-driven landscape that’s constructed with predictive analysis, but also helping create a home that’s wired to help you live your best life. Think life 3.0.

In the future we see, brands will be able to interact directly with consumers based on their needs and by the data collected from everyday appliances. Firebird Summit seeks to connect our lives with technology in new ways. We want users to dictate their needs to appliances like the fridge when it’s time to order some milk or be able to tell your house you need a new pair of pink Chuck Taylors.

We’re not focused on gimmicks, and we’re not a one trick pony. Instead, Firebird Summit seeks to innovate the every day.

Data is everything. Without data, we cannot grow. Because Firebird Summit is designed and built with the medium-sized business in mind, we developed an admin panel, which captures data, trains the system and then utilizes the information.

Because the system is continually learning, we’ve found ways to implement shortcuts that save users time:

The admin panel enters missing pieces that help jumpstart the learning process, which fill in the blanks, allowing for the shared knowledge to carry over and benefit all users. By constantly growing and learning, like the human mind, Firebird Summit’s technology evolves real time.

We are here, and we are ready. We are Firebird Summit.

Our everyday items are becoming smarter. More importantly, consumers are seeing new opportunities for empowerment while old-school institutions are adopting new technology. At Firebird Summit, we’re thrilled to be part of the process of adapting new technology to better suit the needs of today’s consumers. Before we kick off the year with a preview of the things we plan to bring to our customers in 2018, let’s take a moment to review what we accomplished in the last twelve months. 2017 was an exciting build year for the Firebird Summit team. Our main focus was developing Shop by VOICE, a voice-driven technology, leveraging the latest NLP technology, for retail merchants and eCommerce customers.

Firebird Summit has seen the expansion of our stellar development team, the continued improvement of our product Shop By VOICE, industry support and encouragement, and the cultivation of new customers.

How it was in 2017?

Our administration panel is the hub of Shop by VOICE. It offers key metrics at your fingertips. Not only can you view details about users and their shopping habits, but via the admin panel you configure SBV to meet your specific needs. Here you can tailor the system to assign product attributions and relationships, as well as create unique dialogues that guide users through your product catalogue.

Shop by VOICE enhances search results to outperform competitors. SBV’s custom algorithms combined with superior technical capabilities mean that customers are more likely to find the results they want.

With Shop by VOICE’s intelligent search engine, the Smart Assistant can discover relationships between entities within the domain area. These relationships mean that Shop by VOICE asks smarter questions and delivers quicker results.

2018 Product Horizon

We are on fire! Our mission is to continue developing a superior product!

• In the next year we are going to improve our AI models to calculate precise personalized questions flow for every user
• We are adding detection of gender and age to decrease number of questions during search refinement process
• We are going to deliver context based user intention recognition
• We are going to expand our knowledge database to get more understanding of retail specific tag groups
• We are catering an integration with Google Home, Alexa and other smart devices

And much more!

Give Us Your Feedback

The themes above are just a preview of what we are thinking about this year. It is not an exhaustive list of updates and features we plan to release. I hope you are just as excited about these as we are!

Let’s keep the dialogue going. Do you have ideas about what we should do next? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below.

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AI and Machine Learning: Best practices to store, deploy, scale, update & monitor distributed DeepLearning frameworks — on ANY infrastructure.

For Firebird Summit Team new approach paves the way for Shop By VOICE improvement, powered by Firebird Summit Inc.

Machine learning is the science of getting computers to act without being explicitly programmed. In the past decade, machine learning has given us self-driving cars, practical speech recognition, effective web search, and a vastly improved understanding of the human genome. Machine learning is so pervasive today that you probably use it dozens of times a day without knowing it. Many researchers also think it is the best way to make progress towards human-level AI.

During this recent training, we studied the insights related to deep learning training, and gained practice using it and getting them to work for us. More importantly, FirebirdSummit Team improved not only the theoretical underpinnings of deep learning problems, but also gained the practical know-how needed to quickly and powerfully apply these techniques to new problems. Finally, we improved our understanding of the trending in 2018 machine learning methods, such as transfer learning, which allows to resolve client specific problems in cases of limited data sets. The results of applying transfer learning techniques related to machine translation is amazing! It gives up to 10% of quality increase in case of languages from one language family. It’s definitely a game changer for problems with limited data sets! This course provided a broad introduction to machine learning, datamining, and statistical pattern recognition.

Topics included:

1. Supervised learning (parametric/non-parametric algorithms,kernels, neural networks).
2. Unsupervised learning (clustering, dimensionality reduction, recommender systems, deep learning).
3. Best practices in machine learning (innovation process in machine learning and AI).

Firebird Summit Team also learnt how to apply learning algorithms to building smart robots (perception, control), text understanding (web search, anti-spam), computer vision, medical informatics, audio, database mining, and other areas.

If 2017 was a crazy, 2018 is setting up to be bananas technology-wise. Every time we open up Techcrunch or read the Huffington Post’s technology pages, there’s news about some new the tech scene that’s mind boggling. From iPhones and their facial recognition capabilities or drones that can fly through fireworks displays, the news never stops.

We’re doing so much, so fast, it’s almost impossible to keep tabs on what companies are dropping every other week. Hardware comes out with innovations constantly, but software is nearly impossible to keep track of because of its light speed evolution. Whereas the past had its charm thanks to a life of simplicity, today’s world is lightning fast, and the speed is only intensifying.

Our everyday items are becoming smarter. We are seeing a real convergence of where the consumer gets empowered, but also where old-school institutions are adopting new technology at every corner.

A few years ago when you thought of your fridge, you assumed it was simply a place where you store all of your food that needs to be cold. It was a simple, open the door, grab the milk and your business transaction was done. Today, our interactions with the refrigerator aren’t quite the same. Samsung, makers of the iPhone’s main rival, the Galaxy has debuted a four-door fridge with a 21.5 touch screen in the door that can sync to your phone, offers Wi-Fi, and thanks to proximity sensors, can hook up with your cable and shoot the game over to the display, so you don’t miss a play. If that ain’t some straight up Jetsons tech, I don’t know what is.

While hardcore tech heads have always been able to hack just about everything, this new onslaught of new voices in technology is opening up many doors to the mainstream. One of those innovations is the emergence of the Retropie. Last year Nintendo dropped their mini NES that had 30 of the system’s classic games — and then pulled it with no reasoning and no marketplace to download more titles aka Tetris and Mike Tyson’s Punch Out. But, for the gaming community, no one blinked an eye because they knew Retropie was available and cheap to make, and with endless capabilities.

A Retropie is a bootleg gaming system built on the back of the Raspberry Pi. The consoles use Raspbian as OS and integrate emulators for a wide variety of home consoles from the past — most notably Nintendo, Sega, Turbo Graphix 16, to name a few. By just watching a few YouTube videos and ordering parts of Amazon, users can build a gaming system that can be housed within an old NES cartridge and powerful enough to play every video from the 1970’s through to the early 00’s. And when say build the gaming system, it’s not an act of futile rocket science, but an easy set of gluing a few pieces in place and downloading the rest via a laptop. A user can have the entirety of the history of video games in their hands in a few hours instead of a lifetime of collecting like some folks do.

One of the coolest things about computers and Internet culture is the constant state of evolution. What was a dream one day is a reality less than two years later thanks to a landscape that never stops growing. Right now, there are over 15,000 different third-party APIs out in the wild, and that number gets bigger by the week.

What’s an API?

Application Programming Interface (API) are algorithms designed to manage data. Businesses like AirBnB or Salesforce or Lyft allows their e-commerce operations to grab customer information without compromising ethical codes of the e-commerce business.

It’s pretty amazing to think about how far we’ve come from since the year 2000 rollover because just about everything in our lives has changed. Can you imagine telling yourself seventeen years ago that your cell phone would be the most powerful tool of the last 100 years? A cellphone in 2000 was a luxury, and one that took even a bad photo was three years down the road.

One of the reasons why we’ve been able to come so far is innovators are everywhere. The technology that we use daily is and was wide open. For many companies, they build a tool but allow for outside developers to add on or create plugins that revolutionize how their products work. Some of the all-time best API’s have helped software do more, but also transform capabilities.

We wanted to talk about some of the APIs/plugins that helped change the game and helped break open what we thought was only possible in our wildest dreams.



Gotta love Google

One of the best examples of a plugin going to work for the people and bring in a solid return is the lauded Google Analytics API. Because Google opened up their proverbial doors and allowed for developers to access the analytical tracking capabilities, Google is now one of the most powerful ways to track user data. Because developers can build on top of the powerful Google ecosystem, user data has never been so easy to observe but also know critical information from.

Of course, Google never misses a beat and allows every coding language a place at the table, so sources like Python, Java, PHP, etc. are all included in the possible data retrieval for concurrent and relevant information.

Google’s analytics API allows developers to:

Automate monotonous tasks
Create custom dashboards that display their Google analytical data
Integrate data with other business applications and software

So because the ecosystem is capable of a constant evolution of the data flow, the process gets better all the time.



It’s all about the apps

Speaking of Google, you can’t talk about APIs or plugins without talking about the rise of cellphones and their capabilities. Thanks to API’s and plugins and the ability to build atop platforms, developers in both the world of Android and Apple’s iOS have quite literally revolutionized how our society functions. Just about every aspect of our lives touch some form of cell phone API usage, but also how we connect to our favorite applications.

Small firms are creating new technologies daily that people download fall in love with and in many cases like Tinder or Uber we can’t fathom a world without. Because the frameworks are accessible, teams take little ideas and can watch them evolve into powerhouses. In the case of Uber, they built a platform that rests atop the underlying framework of the Google Play universe — without these doors being opened to them, and there’s no way to create this model. Without plugins/APIs, there’s no way your iPhone is getting Twitter, Facebook, or whatever your favorite social media channel is.



Uber knows API

If there’s one company that’s built significant portions of their platform by utilizing API’s, it’s Uber. By monitoring consumption patterns and predictive models, Uber knows preferred routes or what spots get the most calls for a ride. Because of these analytics being accessible Uber knows passenger ride history, their behavior, and frequency of usage.

Because Uber tracks so much data pours it back into the application, they can continually refine and redevelop how the tool works and performs, but also tweak an odd behavior or fix a bug they might have missed.



APIs are everywhere

The travel giant Expedia is said to have 90% of its bookings via mobile. Salesforce has a huge chunk of their business revenue is handled by mobile, as well — like, 50%. But how does that all work, by utilizing the new API worldview — by working with developers and allowing their third-party applications to work with their Saas products the big companies can take their little slice of the pie and see their profits soar from happy customers. For many businesses, this business model is a win/win.

Don’t be surprised to hear more and more about APIs. Soon, they’ll be a standard part of the modern lexicon. The model and the results are just too good.

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We are living in the most interesting era in the history of the world. Just imagine: self-driving cars, flying drones, travelling to Mars, robots from Boston Dynamics that can replace our pets. AI may be taking over, but it’s not the scenario of the Terminator — it’s our current reality.

Technological advancements mean we need to adapt quickly, to be agile, mobile, and reactive as old principles fall by the wayside. Nowhere is this more true than in regards to the human body! Scientists are testing exoskeletons and growing bits of human anatomy in the lab. Technology marches on at a rapid pace, and we need to embrace the new to help those who have special needs.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) published the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Standards for Accessible Design in September 2010. These standards state that all electronic and information technology must be accessible to people with disabilities. The traditional ADA compliance solution has been for those suffering from low vision to adapt to existing technology. Rather than improving the way we interact with today’s technology, the vast majority of tech companies are making users swipe their fingers across a screen and listen to a robotic voice describing all the elements of the page. There are so many more options available today. With AI capabilities that include natural language understanding, information extraction, and speech recognition, accessing information should be a fluid, instinctive process. At Firebird Summit, we believe that ADA compliance will come to incorporate talking to the device with natural speech. It is the most essential way to communicate with electronic devices — not just for those affected by low vision, but for all humans.

We’re working to improve NLU (natural language understanding) modules and speech recognition engines in order to improve lives. And making technology more human is our goal.

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