>> [MUSIC] Alex is just a caring individual.
He's always looking out for those around him,
whether human or dog.
>> My wife and I both volunteer with different rescue groups.
We specialize in difficult dogs
with either behavioral issues or health issues.
>> He finds a lot of drive from wanting to
help people who are suffering in any capacity.
>> My little brother, he's 15 or so years younger than me.
He lives with a number of disabilities
from autism to heart conditions.
He lives with my parents very far away.
The best way that we could bond together
was by playing online games like Minecraft.
He can do it, it's just a little bit slower.
He has to take things one at a time.
He gets very frustrated
very quickly and no longer wants to play the game.
That was just pretty upsetting.
I started down the route of,
what if I could build an assistant
that helps play the game for you?
What if I could just say what I wanted it to do?
I had had years of experience in voice AI,
automatic speech recognition,
and natural language understanding.
Once I had the first prototype version of voice input,
I immediately went to what else can be used?
The original prototypes of Enabled Play
used Azure Cognitive Services for normal speech recognition,
image recognition and computer vision.
I'm also using Azure App Service with an ASP.NET Core
backend for API and
signalR for real-time communication to devices.
Now you're using your face, your hands,
your body position, your voice,
and any other input you might have.
It can be all done at the same time.
>> I'm really interested to dive into what you've been doing.
>> I originally met Bryce virtually.
He was super receptive to me throwing all my ideas at him.
>> Talk to me about latency.
>> Shoot.
>> The first technical challenge that
I ran into was latency issues with voice.
You record a snippet of audio,
you send that to do
the speech recognition and then map it to an input.
It needs to be done on a Cloud server,
then sent to the actual device to run the input.
I overcame that focusing on
predictive and personalized offline models.
We went from one second total turnaround
to under 30 milliseconds per request.
>> Stop, buildup.
>> There's certainly innate bias in voice technology.
Enabled Play allows users with
all different varying speech capabilities to be
able to train the models based off of how they speak.
The same thing goes for gesture.
>> You can use your facial expression
or body position, or your hands.
Then you can add all of those things together and basically create
this truly personal profile for
how you communicate to your computers.
>> It opens up the playing field for
anyone to start to interface with devices.
>> When I met Alex, he was on the cusp of 18,
hadn't gone through college. He was self-taught.
>> I learned a lot from just actually
working through the different GitHub repositories,
especially since Microsoft open source,
basically has everything in it's.Net world,
from.Net framework to.Net Core and now.Net six on multi-platform.
Choosing Azure services enabled me
to automate very easily from just using Visual Studio,
to write my C Sharp code,
to automating deployments using Azure DevOps,
to my Azure app services,
to being able to handle automated updates against
my firmware using the IoT pipelines from Azure.
>> It's allowed me as a single developer
to manage a project that is such a large scale.
>> When Alex's brother got the new modify controller.
He was able to play with
Alex level playing field for the first time.
>> It almost brings me to tears.
It is very emotional.
>> Since that you're thinking about this beyond gaming,
I think I saw you are talking to a school board.
>> Yeah.
>> We don't have a system
whereby our students with certain disabilities,
differing abilities, can contribute to
the development of computer programming projects.
I was really fortunate to meet Alex.
I was blown away by movement of the head,
they could put out a block of code.
We're going to try to pilot this to explore our options.
Because computer science education is for all students.
No one gets left behind.
>> Working with someone like Alex has been
a real joy just watching him grow and develop.
>> Alex has all the tools to make
huge impact and I'm really excited to be part of it. [MUSIC]