Understanding algorithms can make our lives as developers easier, so it's been frustrating to personally find most machine learning tutorials to either be too high-level or too low-level to be beginner-friendly. This blog post is meant to make machine learning algorithms accessible to all, including non-ML engineers.

Some Helpful Vocabulary

• Supervised learning: model learns by looking at correctly-classified, already-labeled data
• Unsupervised learning: model learns by looking at and trying to group unlabeled data according to similarities, patterns and differences on its own

Supervised learning can solve these problems

• Classification: predicts a discrete label or category, like "red", "yes", "pie", "fruit" (ie. will this house sell, what color will the sunset be).
• Regression: predicts a continuous value or quantity, like currency, miles, people . (ie. how much will this house sell for, what time will the sun set).

Here are some supervised learning algorithms which you will come across …

Valentine's Day is coming up and both love and machine learning are in the air. Some would use flower petals to determine if someone loves them or not, but developers might use a tool like TensorFlow. This post will go over how to perform binary text classification with neural networks using Twilio and TensorFlow in Python. Text +16782767139 to test out this text classification.

Prerequisites

• A Twilio account - sign up for a free one here and receive an extra $10 when you upgrade through this link
• A Twilio phone number with SMS capabilities - configure one here
• Set up your Python and Flask developer environment - Make sure you have Python 3 downloaded as well as ngrok.

Setup

Activa …

Businesses can better serve customers by determining how a phone call is going in real-time either with a machine learning model and platform, like TensorFlow, or with an API. This post will show how to perform entity sentiment analysis in real-time on a phone call using Twilio Programmable Voice, Media Streams, and the Google Cloud Speech and Language APIs with Node.js.

Prerequisites

• A Twilio account - sign up for a free one here
• A Twilio phone number with Voice capabilities - configure one here
• Node.js installed - download it here
• Ngrok
• A Google Cloud account with a valid billing method

Document-Level versus Entity-Level Analysis

Entities are phrases in an utterance or text that are c …

Can a computer identify what's in an image? Development libraries like ImageAI make normally-complex Machine Learning tasks including object detection easier. This blog post will show how to build an image classification application using Python, Flask, and ImageAI. The application will receive inbound images with Twilio MMS and respond with a modified image segmented into detected objects and the model's detection confidence percentages.

Prerequisites

• A Twilio account - sign up for a free one here
• A Twilio phone number with SMS capabilities - configure one here
• Set up your Python and Flask developer environment - Make sure you have Python 3 downloaded as well as ngrok.
• OpenCV, T …

As 2019 (and the decade) come to an end, it's interesting to reflect on the time spent. What do our text messages say about how positive or negative our time was? This post uses TensorFlow.js to analyze the sentiment of your Twilio text messages for the year.

Prerequisites

• A Twilio account - sign up for a free one here
• A Twilio phone number with SMS capabilities - configure one here
• Node.js installed- download it here

How does TensorFlow.js help with sentiment analysis?

TensorFlow makes it easier to perform machine learning (you can read 10 things you need to know before getting started with it here) and for this post we will use one of their pre-trained models and training data. Let's go over some high-level definitions:

• Convolutional Neural Network (CNN): a neural network often used to classify images and video that takes input and returns output of a …

Rude or offensive comments can run rampant in today's online communication landscape; however with the power of machine learning, we can start to combat this.

This blog post will show how to classify text as obscene or toxic on the client-side using a pre-trained TensorFlow model and TensorFlow.js. We'll then apply this classification to messages sent in a chat room using Twilio Programmable Chat.

Google provides a number of pre-trained TensorFlow models which we can use in our applications. One of those models was trained on a labeled dataset of Wikipedia comments available on Kaggle. Google has a live demo of the pre-trained TensorFlow.js toxicity model on which you can test phr …

Though I took two college electives related to artificial intelligence (AI) and have used quite a few machine learning (ML) libraries, I am by no means a ML developer. However, like many developers nowadays, I am extremely curious about ML and TensorFlow, a popular library brought up in many conversations surrounding ML. What exactly is it?

What is TensorFlow?

TensorFlow is an open source library released by Google Brain (now Google AI) in 2015 to make it easier for developers to build, train, and generally work with deep learning models and data to make different types of predictions. You can solve tasks like image classification, natural language processing, generate music as in this Twilio post, and more.

I began playing around with TensorFlow a few weeks ago and though it's been fun and I've learned a lot, here are ten things I wish I'd known before using it.

10 …

There's a lot of conflicting information on best practices when building bots, so we set out to make your chatbot-building life easier in our new comprehensive guide to Intelligent Chatbots.

That massive resource provides developers, builders, and DOers with an intelligent bot guide, covering bot use cases, descriptions of how bots work, instructions on building and deploying bots, intelligent bot best practices, and more.

In this post, I’ll summarize some of that guide and tell you what you need to consider to build better bots.

1. Pick your use case and type of chatbots

The purpose of most bots is often to automate tasks, save time, or just to generally make life easier – just like with most other tools and automation. So first, you’ll need to consider your bot’s use case.

Various industries use chatbots in different ways. Here’s a list …

This step-by-step tutorial will go over how to build a Slackbot using Twilio Autopilot and Twilio Functions, saving the user's answers to a MongoDB Atlas database. If you haven't seen part one of this two-part blog series yet, check it out here and make sure you have your Autopilot Slackbot and Function set up before continuing below.

Setup MongoDB

Let's receive and save the data the user gave us. On the MongoDB Cloud Atlas homepage, make a free account. Once logged in, make a new cluster. 

Under Cloud Provider & Region, select a cloud provider. For this post, I decided to use Azure. Then select a region (one with a free tier may be preferable.)

For Cluster Tier, you can …