Building a JavaScript AI Talking Plant 🌱 with Facial Recognition and Real Sensors

I think I covered most of the buzzwords in that title. Maybe I could squeeze in “Smart” and “Lasers” to make it complete!

To be fair, most of the services used in this project are existing AWS services and the actual work I did was to make all these services work together.

It’s probably worth having a look at the finished project to put all this in context:

I think the end result is pretty impressive … there’s definitely a lot going on in this project so let’s try and break it down into smaller pieces. That is actually how I like getting started with complex projects: list all the problematic areas of the app and build a quick proof of concept for each of these.

In the case of this project, it meant building a quick example for:

• Speech recognition and intent detection
• Face and object recognition
• Reading physical sensors

Once I had all these working I was ready to put everything together.

This post is not meant to be a complete, step-by-step tutorial. It’s more like an introduction to help you understand how…