Amara Graham

Millennial Tech Female || Developer Advocate at IBM || Previously at Intel. Opinions are my own.

Amara Graham

Intro to Calling Third Party AI Services in Unreal Engine

May 24, 2019 • ☕️ 6 min read

Game DevelopmentUnreal EngineProgrammingRest Api

I have absolutely no experience with the Unreal Engine (UE4), but since I’ve done talks at meetups and conferences about my work with Unity (that I also had no experience in until about a year and a…

Updating Your Unity Project to Watson SDK for Unity 3.1.0 (and Core SDK 0.2.0)

May 7, 2019 • ☕️ 3 min read

Ibm WatsonUnity3dProgramming

A number of breaking changes hit all the Watson SDK’s for this year’s first major release, but your existing code on older SDK versions should continue working just fine. This means I’ve been working…

Capturing Audio in the Browser For “Wake Words”

April 16, 2019 • ☕️ 5 min read

NodejsChatbotsAudioProgrammingConversational UI

Using Watson Speech to Text, Assistant, and MediaStream Recording API for a browser based Wake Word Demo

A Few of My Favorite (Dev) Things

March 4, 2019 • ☕️ 3 min read

GithubProgrammingSoftware Development

I am well aware it is March, no where near the holiday season, and tomorrow we close out our gluttonous ways with Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, Carnival, or whatever you call the day before the start of…

What is cURL and why is it all over API docs?

February 19, 2019 • ☕️ 4 min read

APIWeb DevelopmentProgrammingDocumentationCoding

Now its been a while since I took computer science classes, but even then I’m not sure I was explicitly taught what cURL was or how to use it. So let’s do that now. cURL, which stands for client URL…

Screenshot for Mac!

January 23, 2019 • ☕️ 1 min read

AppleOS XScreenshots

I was dragging my feet after seeing my coworkers and internet friends get “Mojaved”, a catch-all term for issues experienced after upgrading to the latest, greatest MacOS. Ain’t nobody got time for…

Where did the Watson Unity Assets go?

January 3, 2019 • ☕️ 1 min read

Unity3dUnityIbm WatsonSdkProgramming

If you are looking for the Watson SDK for Unity or the Speech Sandbox, they are now only available through GitHub and IBM Developer. Here are the links:

Watson Services Username/Password vs. API Key

December 12, 2018 • ☕️ 2 min read

Artificial IntelligenceWatson ConversationIbm WatsonIBMChatbots

I want to start by apologizing for not getting this post out earlier. I know there has been a ton of confusion in this space and I’m incredibly sorry for that. I feel some responsibility as a…

Building Your Internal Army — DevRelCon London Follow Up

November 21, 2018 • ☕️ 5 min read

Developer RelationsDeveloper AdvocacyPersonal Development

This year I was lucky enough to give a talk at DevRelCon London which also happened to be my first year attending the conference! Speaking slots were 20 minutes long (no Q&A time at the end, my…

Setting Up Android Things on MacOS

October 2, 2018 • ☕️ 2 min read

AndroidIoTMacosAndroid ThingsMakers

I received an Android Things Starter kit from a Women Techmakers event for International Women’s Day at Google earlier this year and shortly after that moved across the country. I finally found some…

Retiring My Wedding Planner Chatbot

September 11, 2018 • ☕️ 4 min read

Wedding PlanningChatbotsIbm WatsonBotsMachine Learning

Weddings are the perfect storm of organized chaos meets family reunion. And I’m not just talking about the day of, I’m talking about the whole darn thing. Wedding planning is an exercise in…

Parsing JSON in C#/Unity

August 23, 2018 • ☕️ 2 min read

CsharpUnity3dJsonProgramming

In a world where almost everything is exposed with a REST API, JSON parsing becomes skill number 1 (unless you get helper/wrapper functions in an SDK or find some cheeky asset that does this for you…

Unity + MAX (Model Asset Exchange)

August 1, 2018 • ☕️ 3 min read

Machine LearningDeep LearningAIUnity3dArtificial Intelligence

Ever sat down at your computer and thought “I’d really like to use deep learning to solve this problem but I don’t have the {insert something here} to do it”. Maybe its the huge data set or the deep…

What Call for Code Means to Me

June 29, 2018 • ☕️ 4 min read

Hurricane KatrinaDisaster ResponseDisaster ReliefDisaster RecoveryCall For Code

Hurricane season runs from June 1st to November 1st. As early as I can remember, my mom and I picked up a hurricane tracking guide from the local grocery store and watched the storms as they entered…

How to Build a Custom Language Model

June 26, 2018 • ☕️ 2 min read

Artificial IntelligenceSpeech RecognitionLanguageWatsonUnity3d

I have been building a Unity side project with a teammate across the pond using Watson Assistant, Speech-to-Text, and Text-to-Speech to play some virtual reality chess. With most of the basic…

Zero to AR AI App… Again! Sort of.

June 18, 2018 • ☕️ 4 min read

Artificial IntelligenceARVuforiaWatsonSpeech Recognition

I made an AR AI app late last year, maybe you even read the post or attend a talk or meetup I did earlier this year about how to build it. My colleague in Germany Niklas Heidloff recently used it to…

Wrapping Up the Chatbot Series (feat. Watson Assistant)

May 29, 2018 • ☕️ 2 min read

BotsChatbotsChatbot DevelopmentWatsonVirtual Assistant

Y’all, we made it through the chatbot series. And while parts were a struggle, I’d like to do a super brief recap of what stuck out in my mind without dwelling on the bad. Let’s spend a little more…

How to Developer Advocate with Migraines

May 15, 2018 • ☕️ 7 min read

MigrainesSelf ImprovementWomen In Tech

This post is going to be slightly different from others I’ve written, but just as important. You don’t have to be a developer advocate to learn something, but that’s my current role so naturally that…

First Chatbot Experience with Wit.ai

May 11, 2018 • ☕️ 4 min read

BotsChatbotsChatbot Platforms

Need some context? Check out the intro, the first blog on Dialogflow, the second blog on Azure, or the third blog on AWS. I wrote this blog like 3 times at this point. I was having a really hard time…

First Chatbot Experience With AWS (Amazon Lex)

April 20, 2018 • ☕️ 6 min read

BotsChatbotsAmazon LexAWS

Originally I thought I would just be making an Alexa Skill that happened to be a chatbot, but after a little more research and poking around, I thought Amazon Lex was going to be the most comparable…

First Chatbot Experience on Azure

April 12, 2018 • ☕️ 7 min read

BotsChatbotsAzure

I didn’t want to start off negative, but I hit two 404s and a credit card requirement within seconds of signing up for an Azure account. This is a huge bummer. Now, I was on hotel wifi for a portion…

First Chatbot Experience With Dialogflow

April 2, 2018 • ☕️☕️ 8 min read

BotsChatbotsChatbot PlatformsChatbot DevelopmentVirtual Assistant

In case you missed my first post, I’m building a Chatbot on Every Platform! Often I’m asked what the technical differences are between chatbot platforms and frameworks, so here I am embarking on a…

A Chatbot on Every Platform!

March 26, 2018 • ☕️ 2 min read

BotsChatbotsWatsonDevelopmentProgramming

Watson Conversation has been enhanced and rebranded to Watson Assistant during the draft of this post. Actually, I’ve been busy with life and things as I move across the country and prep for a…

How to Show Code To the Back of a Room

January 26, 2018 • ☕️ 2 min read

DesignPresentingSpeakersHow To

It’s not entirely uncommon for me to watch a meetup or workshop room fill from back to front. Or back to middle to front. Or middle to back to front. But never front first. Which means your content…

Build Your First AI AR App on Unity

January 4, 2018 • ☕️☕️ 11 min read

IOSAIARUnityIbm Watson

Jan 7, 2018 UPDATE: Conversation was rebranded to “Assistant”. Workspaces will eventually become “Skills”. You may have a username/password or API Key, depending on the age and region your services…

1 Watson Conversation Gotcha

December 29, 2017 • ☕️ 1 min read

BotsWatsonWatson ConversationRest ApiJson

When working with Watson Conversation, like any conversational bot builder, there are a few gotchas. For example, one of the less obvious but most annoying ones is placing a node below the Fallback…

How to Learn Unity and Watson

December 27, 2017 • ☕️ 6 min read

Virtual RealityUnity3dIbm WatsonVuforiaCsharp

I’ll let you in on a little secret. Shh, don’t tell anyone. My favorite part of the year is right now — when people go on vacation, the office gets quiet, and I get to dig myself out of the “TODO…

PowHERful Challenges My Advocate Skills

November 15, 2017 • ☕️ 2 min read

Women In TechStem EducationIBMIbm WatsonTechnology

If you would have told me that I would spend a Saturday morning leading young women through a set of coding exercises, I would have called you crazy. And not young women like high schoolers, young…

Did you know I sit on a Board?

October 23, 2017 • ☕️ 3 min read

EducationComputer ScienceVolunteering

I went to an enormous high school and graduated with 880 people. That’s more people than some small towns. The ceremony was horrendously long as I saw people, I swear, I’ve never seen before walk…

API World + Watson Tone Analyzer Follow On

October 3, 2017 • ☕️ 2 min read

Artificial IntelligenceAPIIbm WatsonSentiment AnalysisPubnub

I could not have timed this any better. Shortly after delivering my talk at API World with Bhavana Srinivas of PubNub, I saw this fly by in my Twitter feed: I covered the Watson Tone Analyzer service…

How to Survive a Conference

September 21, 2017 • ☕️ 2 min read

ConferenceTipsTech

O’Reilly’s AI Conference in San Francisco just wrapped up yesterday and I had a few thoughts on surviving similar events. If you go into a conference thinking everyone is coping in their own ways…

Getting to Know Watson

August 24, 2017 • ☕️ 5 min read

Artificial IntelligenceIbm WatsonAPIDevelopment

I’m celebrating about a month and a half of being an IBMer, and so far its going great! Like any new job, I was initially overwhelmed by just about anything and everything and now I’ve finally…

Recap: Celebrating Women in AI Dinner

August 18, 2017 • ☕️ 2 min read

FoodWomen In TechAIDiversity In TechCodelikeagirl

Last night, I attended the “Celebrating Women in AI” dinner, which brought together some of the brilliant female AI researchers and technologists in the Bay Area. I met women I followed on Twitter in…

TJBot Introduces Me to IoT & Watson Services

July 17, 2017 • ☕️ 3 min read

Women In TechIbm WatsonIoTGirls Who CodeEditorials

Hello, world! Today marks Day 9 of my employment with IBM as a developer advocate. I’m badge official, have a computer, and I know like five people by face and name. Excellent progress, I know! Now…