Sure, we all use AI in our everyday lives now, but what about taking a crack at training your own? Google Labs has a really cool project called Teachable Machine, which allows you to create and train your own basic AI model. The best part? You don’t need to know a thing about coding to do it.
Right now it’s limited to making models that recognize images, sounds, and body poses. More capabilities may arrive in the future. Teach it the difference between a ripe banana and a green one, how to recognize a clap instead of a whistle, or even to tell whether you’re sitting or standing. Those are just ideas off the top of my head. You can let your imagination run wild.
On the Teachable Machine website, click Get Started and choose whether you want to work with images, audio, or poses. Now it’s time to train the model by giving it examples to learn from. So, for example, if you’re training it to recognize images, you can upload photos or just use your webcam to show it different objects—the more examples the better. It’ll ask you to give each group of examples a name. Now click Train Model and watch it get to work.
Once training is complete, you can show it new photos or use your webcam to see how well it recognizes different objects in real time. If it isn’t getting things right, then it’s time to get back to training. Add more examples, train it again, and see if it improves. It’s a great way to get a feel for why the data you feed an AI model is so important.
If you want to take things a step further, you can even export your trained model and use it in your own website or app, although you’ll probably need some coding know-how for that. Otherwise, Teachable Machine is a fascinating afternoon project and an easy way to dip your toes into AI development.
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