Category: AWS
My Problem While there’s a slew of automated trading solutions for both stocks and crypto, I wanted to try building my own as a learning exercise and to give myself more control. A few of the solutions boast some form of ML-driven logic but most use classic standards (RSI, MACD, etc). This is fine but…
My disappointment with my Amazon Echo/Alexa device doubled every time I tried to use it and, after some recent exploration with live video streaming, I wanted to pair my desire for a quirky voice assistant with my desire to learn more about audio stream handling in javascript. The result is a cheesy AI voice assistant…
A few months ago I tried using AWS Rekognition to detect text in images. The results were okay for casual use cases but overall the quality was pretty poor (primarily because Rekognition isn’t intended to be used as an OCR product). A few days ago (May 29), AWS announced the general availability of Textract, an…
The “Call Me” concept isn’t new but it’s low-hanging fruit that many don’t take advantage of. Using Amazon Connect, we’ll create a simple UI to improve the caller experience while saving 46% on our telephony costs (assuming we’re making US-destined calls with a US East/West instance) by diverting inbound toll-free calls to outbound DID calls.…
I’ve read many different guides on this but none seemed to provide end-to-end guidance or were cluttered with other noise unrelated to Lambda or Connect. The power of Lambda function inclusion in the contact flow is immense – perform security functions, lookup/validate/store data, lookup customer data for CRM integration, etc. While learning this, I created…
Amazon Connect is the AWS answer to costly contact center telephony platforms. There’s no upfront costs and overall usage is EXTREMELY cheap when compared to legacy telephony platforms – you essentially just pay per minute. I wanted to play with this a bit so I setup an instance and created a simple script to place…
I wanted to stream and record my home security cameras to the cloud for three reasons: 1) if the NVR is stolen, I’ll have the footage stored remotely, 2) (more realistically) I want to increase the storage availability without having to add hard drives, and 3) I want to increase the ease-of-access for my recordings.…
A couple years ago, I tinkered with a solution to use a webcam to capture images of receipts, covert the images to raw text, and store in a database. My scrappy solution worked okay but it lacked the accuracy to make it viable for anything real-world. With AWS Rekognition launching since then, I figured I’d…
I wanted to try my hand at using the AWS Polly text-to-speech service. Polly offers several different voices and supports multiple languages, most of which sound pretty good, especially if you use SSML when passing text. SSML is where the character of the speech (rate, tone, pitch, etc) come into play. See here for more detail.…
Humans spend a lot of time reading, analyzing, and responding through text (emails, chats, etc). A lot of this is inefficient or not for pleasure (such as the amount of payroll companies spend to read through feedback emails or the amount of time I spend sifting through Outlook each day). Using Natural Language Processing (NLP),…
