Presenting Deep Greetings- An AI System that might just replace Theodore from ‘Her’
Spike Jonze’s ‘Her’ was a revolutionary movie in its futuristic depiction of the heightened role of technology in our everyday lives. From playing personalized music to finding appropriate people to talk to in online chat-rooms, and even going as far as acting as a romantic companion for humans, the movie explored the exciting potential of Artificial Intelligence.
While almost every task in ‘Her’ was automated, Theodore’s job of writing out personalized greeting cards was still performed by humans. Given the recent and continuing academic debate over automation and the jobs of the future, researchers expect multiple waves of luddism. Card writing, while not generally pegged as a mainstream career choice, might stick around due to the need for greeting cards to have the element of personalization and human compassion.
Artificial Intelligence Researchers at Next Tech Lab, a student-run research lab at SRM University, India have gone one step beyond to challenge these notions with their most recent project titled ‘Deep Greetings’. Leveraging the might of two emerging technologies — Deep Learning and Augmented Reality, the team has created a completely automated system to generate extremely personalized greeting cards for every festival, occasion and even individual persons.
So, unsure of how to spread the holiday cheer this festive season? Never fear, for Deep Greetings is here!
The information needed for the application:
- The festival for which the user wants to generate the card
- An image that the user wants to use as the cover for the greeting card
- A personal video with festive greetings from the sender to the recipient.
Deep Greetings will take care of the rest.
The application has three concrete aspects which define it: Neural Style Transfer, Greeting Generation and an Augmented Reality embedding.
Neural Style Transfer is an application of Artificial Intelligence which uses state-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Networks to generate the cover of the greeting card. It transfers the style of one image onto another image, while keeping the content of the latter but changing its style.This is used to make any image given by the user seem appropriate to be used as the cover of a greeting card of any festival. It doesn’t get more personalized than this. Or does it?
Gone are the days of receiving the same greeting card with the same, quintessential greeting in a clichéd template.Instead, Deep Greetings generates personalized textual greetings using a LSTM model which learns long term dependencies to generate these new greetings dynamically for every festival. Trained on data relevant to the festival, a word level Recurrent Neural Network generates new horror poems for Halloween,new love letters for Valentine’s day, or any text any festival of your choice! The generated text is then superimposed on the Style Transferred image and voilà, you have your greeting card!
With Halloween just around the corner, it’s the perfect time to watch The Shining. Or why not send out Halloween cards with Jack Nicholson’s face on it instead?
Or want to take your better half to Paris for Valentine’s day? Just send her a romantic card of the Eiffel Tower as a clue maybe?
The third part of Deep Greetings incorporates an Augmented Reality feature using Vuforia and Unity which allows the user to embed a short video greeting which can be viewed on the receiver’s smartphone or tablet by focusing on the greeting card as an image target. Pretty cool right?
This is how the application works as a whole:
The code used to make Deep greetings is currently open sourced on Github (https://github.com/Aparnaakk/festivAI) and is in the process of being made into an application for Android and iOS.
Next Tech Lab is undergraduate research Lab doing active research in areas of Artificial Intelligence, Human-Computer Interaction, Computational Biology and Internet of Things among other fields.Sharing an unique music and art culture, the lab aims to develop innovate applications and projects ahead of their time using cutting edge Technology.They truly believe that his project can help make greetings great again.
