Today, we are happy to announce the public release of devAIce® Web API 4.1.0. This update comes with several noteworthy model updates for emotion and age recognition, the deprecation of the Sentiment module, an official PHP client, improved client samples, as well as other minor tweaks, improvements and fixes.
As always, we recommend all users of devAIce® Web API to consider updating to the latest API version in order to take advantage of model enhancements, fixes and new functionality.
What’s new in devAIce® Web API 4.1.0
Emotion model robustness improvements
This latest release of devAIce® Web API introduces updated dimensional and categorical emotion models in the Emotion (Large) module. In benchmarks, the new versions of these models are shown to be significantly more robust against background noises and different recording conditions than the previous models, all while keeping the computational complexity of the models unchanged.
When updating to this newer version of the models, please keep in mind that any application-specific thresholds or logic you may have defined for the model output based on the previous version may need to be re-evaluated and adjusted for the new version. This is because, even though the value ranges and semantics of the emotion dimensions and categories have not changed between versions, the new models may still behave differently in certain aspects that invalidate your previously determined logic and thresholds.
For more details on this and other model updates, please see the announcement blog post of the devAIceⓇ SDK 3.7.0 release.
New generation age model
The age model previously included in devAIce® has been replaced in this release with a completely new model based on a modern deep learning architecture. On average, the new model is almost twice as accurate as the predecessor model (in terms of average prediction error in years).
For more details on this and other model updates, please see the announcement blog post of the devAIce® SDK 3.7.0 release.
Deprecation of the Sentiment module
Support for the Sentiment module has been removed from devAIce® Web API starting with this release.
For more details on this and other model updates, please see the announcement blog post of the devAIce® SDK 3.7.0 release.
Official PHP client available
devAIce® Web API now comes with an official PHP client library which makes it very easy to access the API from PHP 7.4 or later versions. We recommend all users who are currently accessing the API from PHP by sending and parsing requests and responses manually to consider switching to this library as it takes care of implementing the low-level details of the API and facilitates updating to future versions.
The library comes as a Composer package and can be added as a Composer dependency to your project. If you do not use Composer to manage your dependencies in your PHP application, you can alternatively copy the client to your source tree and reference it directly.
The devAIce® Web API update comes with a sample PHP application that demonstrates usage of the client library in your code.
Extended client samples
With this release of devAIce® Web API, we have significantly extended the code samples that we ship for all officially supported API clients. This includes the clients for Python, .NET, Java, JavaScript, and, starting with this update, PHP. We have made sure that each of the samples covers all API endpoints and their functionality, thus getting started with devAIce® Web API has never been easier before.
Other changes and improvements
The update comes with a fix for an issue that led the Speaker Attributes module to fail if either the gender or age output had been disabled via the module configuration.
As always, you can find a full list of all changes in this release in the official changelog document that comes as part of the devAIce® Web API package.
