Video - Text to Speech in Sinhala with Azure Speech Service

Microsoft Azure recently given Sinhala language support in text to speech functionality in Speech Services,

In this video I explained how Sinhala Text to Speech can be achieved with Azure Speech services.

Video - Azure Face API and Power Apps to try out your Sunglasses !!

In this video I explained how Azure Face API can be used with Microsoft Power Apps

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Azure Face API and Power Apps to try out your next sunglasses

I wanted to try out Face API features with Power Apps and thought of following use case.

Let's take Contoso, which sells sunglasses. They have a mobile application where customers can check sunglasses online. I need to ensure that, when they try out their new glasses, they should be properly placed on their eyes, Whatever the way they take their pictures!!

Can we do this with Face API?

Following is the expected result

Let me explain how I did this. Since this is a long post I will break the work in to following segments

• Prepare the controls of Power App
• Configure Azure Blob storage container and create connection
• Configure Azure Face API instance and create connection
• Script the application

Prepare the controls of Power App

Step 01: Create a new Power App from blank template

Step 02: Add a camera control

Step 03: Add a image control to show the picture taken from camera

Step 04: Add a toggle control switch between front camera and the back camera

Step 5: Add a button to upload image to Azure Blob Storage and to send the same image to Azure Face API

Step 6: Add another image control to place the image from Azure Blob storage and later overlay the sunglass image.

Step 7: Let's upload some images of sunglasses with transparent background. Later we will create three image controls and assign each image as the source

Configure Azure Blob storage container and create connection

Step 1: Create a blob container. we will make the container anonymous to keep it simple

Step 2: Create Azure Blob Storage connector in Power Apps

Configure Face API instance and create connection

Step 1: Create a Face API instance. I selected the free pricing tier

Step 2: Copy API key and endpoint URL

Step 3: Create the Face API connector

Step 4: Navigate to Power App and connect the data source we just created

Now all the configurations are done!. Let's move to the functions.

Script the application

Step 1: When we deploy the application to mobile devices, we need to select the front facing camera. We will use the toggle control to switch cameras.

Select the camera control that we have added to the screen and change the Camera property

Toggle1.Value

Step 2: Using the OnSelect event in Camera control, place the photo in a collection. and initialize the fileName variable. This will be used later when saving the file in Blob storage

ClearCollect(facePic,Camera1.Photo);
Set(fileName,Concatenate(Rand(),".png"));

That's it for the Camera control.

Step 3: We will now do necessary changes in preview image control. We need to set the image source to the picture we took in previous step. We will initialize the Image property,

 

First(facePic).Url

Step 4: Let's initialize the Image value of our Image control which will be used to place the picture from Azure Blob storage. We will set the value when we click the action button.

azimage

Step 5: Let's do the configuration for the action button. There are two steps. First, we need to upload the image to Azure Blob storage.

AzureBlobStorage.CreateFile("/image2",fileName,First(facePic).Url);
Set(azimage, AzureBlobStorage.GetFileContentByPath("image2/"&fileName));

Then we will call the Detect operation in FaceAPI connector to get relevant landmarks

ClearCollect(faceLand,First(FaceAPI.Detect("https://dinushastorage.blob.core.windows.net/image2/"&fileName)).faceLandmarks);

Step 6: Now we can add the functionality for our sunglass image. We will initialize a variable for the Image property.

glassImage

Step 7: Now we will set the actual image for our sunglass. We have 3 images. in each control we have this code at OnSelect event.

Set(glassImage,'Sun-02');

Step 8: Let's place the sunglass image we have selected on top of my eyes. We will use face Landmarks to do the adjustment. Do following changes in sunglass image

Height

(First(faceLand).eyeLeftOuter.y - First(faceLand).eyebrowLeftOuter.y) + 100

Width

(First(faceLand).eyebrowRightOuter.x - First(faceLand).eyebrowLeftOuter.x) + 40

X

First(faceLand).eyebrowLeftOuter.x-20

Y

452+ First(faceLand).eyeLeftBottom.y -60

That's all we need to do. Your intelligent sunglass app is ready :)

Video - Azure Active Directory and Role Based Access Control (RBAC)

In this video I explained identity, scopes and roles concepts in Azure Active Directory. I demonstrated Azure AD Roles as well as Azure Roles.

Following is the presentation

Azure active directory and role based access control from Dinusha Kumarasiri

Video - End to end IoT Solution with Azure IoT Hub, Event Grid and Logic Apps

In this video I explained how we can connect to IoT devices with IoT Hub and respond to telemetry with Event Grid and Logic Apps.

Following are the related blog articles I did recently 

• Testing IOT Hub with Raspberry Pi Azure IoT Online Simulator
• Take actions based on IOT telemetry with IOT Hub, Event Grid and Logic App