Not too long ago, at Sovrn, we had an AI Hackathon the place we had been inspired to experiment with something associated to machine studying. The Hackathon yielded some improbable initiatives from throughout the corporate. All the things from SQL question mills to chatbots that may reply questions on our merchandise and different unimaginable work. I believed this may be an incredible alternative to study extra about Apple’s ML instruments and perhaps even construct one thing with actual enterprise worth.
Just a few of my colleagues and I teamed as much as play with CreateML and CoreML to see if we may combine some ML performance into our iOS app. We acquired a mannequin skilled and built-in into our app in a number of hours, which was fairly wonderful. However we rapidly realized that we had a number of issues to unravel earlier than we may truly ship this factor.
- The mannequin was hefty. It was about 50MB. That’s loads of house to take up in our app bundle.
- We wished to replace the mannequin with out releasing a brand new app model.
- We wished to make use of the mannequin within the internet browser as effectively.
We didn’t have time to unravel all of those issues. However the different day I used to be exploring the Vapor internet framework and the thought hit me, “Why not deploy CoreML fashions on the server?”
Apple gives a number of pre-trained fashions, so right now we’ll deploy a picture classification mannequin on the server behind a REST API with Vapor and create a SwiftUI consumer to eat it.
This prototype is simply that, a prototype. It’s not meant to be a production-ready resolution. It’s meant to be a proof of idea. There will likely be warnings within the console, and the code received’t be very clear, however it’s going to work and hopefully get your wheels turning.
If you wish to skip all this, or in the event you do wish to comply with alongside, you will discover the supply code for this undertaking on GitHub.
Okay, disclaimers over. Let’s get began!
- Xcode 15
- macOS 14
- Homebrew
- Apple Developer Account + Bodily System for testing
