Microsoft Band - Sample sound recording? - microsoft-band

Is this possible to record short, sample sound (like 10-15 sec) and store on paired phone/device?
Allowing user to gather sample sound from environment would be rally beneficial to our product.

unfortunately the Microsoft Band does not support this feature and the microphone is not exposed via an API of the current SDK https://developer.microsoftband.com/bandSDK

As danvy has said, unfortunately it isn't available within the SDK to access the microphone.
If there is enough voice from developers for this to be added, I'm sure that the Microsoft Band team would be happy to expose more of the features in the Band to developers through the SDK. There is a UserVoice site just for the Microsoft Health & Band team which you can ask for these sorts of features but I'm also sure that they check here too!

Related

Cost of developing a Google Assistant App?

What costs are involved with developing and/or releasing a Google Assistant App?
eg: Can you develop an app using DialogFlow and a backend (say Firebase) without having to pay while you learn?
First of all - you don't need to use Dialogflow or Firebase to develop your action. Both are suggested, but neither are required. You can use any NLP you want, or none at all if you use the Actions SDK (but you want an NLP). You can use any backend at all, including running it off your local machine and tunneling to it via ngrok, but you don't want to do that for production.
But, during development (and even during a light deployment before your action becomes massively popular and a stand-out hit), you have lots of solutions that will be free.
Dialogflow is free for use with the Google Assistant. Period. There is an Enterprise edition which offers additional services and support for a cost, but you won't need them. There are restrictions, but you won't bump into them until you hit 3 requests per second - which you shouldn't during development.
Firebase's free tier (the Spark Plan) is good for very simple experimentation, but once you start doing network calls to outside Google's network (if you are trying to call the network API for other services), you will be blocked. No worries! The "Blaze Plan" paid tier does require a way to bill you, but they don't start billing you until you get quite a bit of usage: 2 million function calls / month and similarly scaled usage of CPU, memory, and network. So even the "Blaze Plan" will be free during development (and for basic usage).
Updated, December 2020
Things have changed a bit since the original answer was posted, but the underlying basics remain true - there is no charge to develop for Actions on Google.
Dialogflow now has an "Essentials" edition and a more advanced "CX" edition. While you can still use both to build Actions, they're not really intended for this purpose anymore.
Instead, Google has included the Actions Builder into the Actions Console to handle the NLP work. The Actions SDK works with this, but can also just pass along all the STT information to your webhook. Both are also free to use.
Dialogflow is for free if you don't use it as an enterprise:
https://dialogflow.com/pricing/
And Firebase free tier should be enough if you not using firebase
already for other projects. enter link description here
But of course you have to calculate your own time so in case of the
spent time probably not.
For everything else yes it is, as long as you not using it already somewhere. You can for development also host your server local and use an ngrok tunnel as sever address for Dialogflow.
As an addition to shortQuestion's answer:
The free plan in Firebase should be enough if you're just using it for learning and developing apps for personal use. If you want to go a bit further you'll need to upgrade the plan.
You can sign up with a free trial for actions on Google to get 300$ of credits during a 12 month period which would be more than enough to do anything you want.
The costs of Firebase/Actions on Google on a higher plan aren't anything to worry about though, you'd be talking about a few cent per multiple hundred thousand requests.

SDKs and Beacon/Bluetooth LE development

There are a few beacon sites that released their SDK. For example, say
https://www.gimbal.com/ has an SDK for you to implement in your mobile
app so that you can talk to their manufactured beacons. Say you
appreciated many of the features and tools that their software had,
but you wanted to develop more tools... or maybe custom campaigns for
their beacons to be programmed to do. How would you go about doing
this? Can you build on top of an SDK? Mainly my question is, how can I
program their beacons to do more than their CMS offers? If I wanted to
build my own CMS with custom functionality and campaigns, could I do
this? How would I go about doing this?
How does a Beacon works?
You have an UUID (which refers to a company), a major, an minor and a RSSI.
Let's try with an example. Let's say that the UUID is from BestBuy, it will be the same for all its BestBuy beacons.
Then, the Major will determine in which stores it is (the one in Atlanta, the one in New York, etc.)
Then, the minor will determine where in this store the Beacon it is (near the DVD stand, near the TV stand, etc.)
And the RSSI (with the Tx—1m information) will help you to determines the distance between the beacon and you.
But, since, an UUID is only a suite of hex values, major/minor/rssi numbers, you have to know what they mean (if its the store in Atlanta or the one in New York, etc.)
So it means that the app needs the knowledge, inside it, or by asking a server
So, as long as you're connected to this database, you're good.
So I don't know about their SDK, since I worked with a custom made iBeacon, but it means, that if the SDK allows you to access the "numbers" and not "the translation", you're good and can do whatever you like. It depends on how much "transparency" the SDK give.
In other words, you could provide an "complement" of the SDK with your own.

Is Firebase an all-purpose database?

I've been reading about Firebase and playing with it for a short while. The idea (BAAS) and implementation are impressive, and having programmed with Javascript it seems a viable choice. Not having to deal with scaling and other server side concerns makes it even more attractive.
My question is: generally speaking, is Firebase a first class back-end candidate for any average data-based application? e.g. billing, CRM, e-commerce, social, location based, etc. I do not include super light or heavy extremes such as a basic chat, or a nuclear plant monitor...
The answer may not be a clear yes/no, but was it built to support the general application space, or just stand out as a real-time read/write data service?
Would appreciate answers based on experience and existing production applications.
Thanks
Yes, Firebase is intended to be a first class back-end for any data based Web, iOS or Android application. The service offers real-time data reads and writes, but also comes with a powerful and flexible security system that allows you to write secure client-only apps, without needing any server code to enforce data boundaries.
There are several apps in production listed on the front page as customer and on the app showcase page on https://firebase.google.com/customers/
Firebase is now more capable and is considered as a full stand-alone back-end, especially after the introduction of cloud function. https://firebase.google.com/docs/functions/
Firebase may not have support for transaction spanning multiple business objects.
e.g. When a sales order is booked then it needs to update inventory for multiple items, update billing in receivables, give sales credit to multiple sales persons etc.
Firebase team is supposed to come up with a database trigger option which will make all these happen.

Does Simperium allow multi user collaboration?

On their Overview page one of the bullet points under "What it does" is:
Multiple users can collaborate with the same data at the same time
However there's nothing in the documentation to suggest how this can be done, all the real time syncing is done only between devices logged in with the same user. Their own Simplenote app which is built on the platform does allow multi-user collaboration, but this would appear to be using a private API that is not available to normal Simperium clients.
Is there something I've missed? Is it a feature that will be added in the future? If so, when?
We didn't release the collaboration feature yet, but if you'd like to test it, please, mail us and we'll get in touch with you: jorge.perez#automattic.com
Thank you!

Flex Mobile In-App Billing/Purchase

I've looked all over and found nothing about this topic - For people making mobile app games and want to sell levels or potions or whatnot from within the app, is this supported on Flex mobile apps? Are there plans to introduce it? I've found info about advertisement implementation... is this a possible next step? Do you have to use something like PayPal instead of Android Market?
Sorry if this has been asked, but I haven't found anything yet.
Thanks!
I know Adobe said at GDC Conference they are in the process of analyzing requirements to make in-app purchases available via Flash Player API. It's almost a year so far since that announcement but there has not been any further news. The work around/the way most client-server implement these business rule is on the server-side where they implement an entitlements model.
Yes, there are several native extensions that implement this functionality.
I have been using the ones from Milkman Games with good results, and the support is fantastic. No financial association, just a very satisfied user.
There is also a free iOS Storekit ANE as well, although in my experience with it there are still some bugs, notably with blank receipt values for restored transactions: http://code.google.com/p/in-app-purchase-air-ios/
Note: implementing your own entitlements is ill-advised for various reasons:
Apple doesn't allow using anything other than their own in-app
purchase API on iOS.
The various store implementations (well, Apple's
and Amazon's at least, Google Play is another story) handle all of
the details of international purchases and localized pricing for
you.
The store implementations handle payments, subscriptions, durable purchases, and a host
of other details that you will spend a lot of time getting right on your own.

Resources