After the outstanding beta tests we have 3 months ago - huge thanks to all people who helped there, your are awesome, I couldn’t make it without your ideas and support! - the app is finally available.
I made chess eBook Reader that makes chess books interactive. Open a book, send it to analysis just the first time, once finished, double-click on any chess diagram in the book and explore it on the analysis board. More in comments from r/chess
The bot now adds "games database" link near the analysis links if there are any games in the database with a recognized position.
Huge thanks to u/krelin for suggesting the feature.
A few months ago I proposed the idea of an app making chess eBooks interactive
Now, I'm hosting a small private beta testing round of the app. Testing is nothing time consuming, everything should take at most several minutes but if you like you can play with it as long as you want.
Anybody who enjoys chess eBooks and is interested in taking part in beta testing, please email me or send a PM on Reddit.
This is how the app looks at the moment:
So far 32 people signed up for the beta tests. I'm so excited for this!
I had that idea that hints could be useful in bot's responses, so I added them just the previous night.
Now, if possible, the bot will add two hints to its analysis:
The first hint is about what piece to move
The second is about what exact move should be made
Several people suggested me, following my recently created chessvision.ai, to create an app where you can upload a chess ebook (let's say pdf or another popular format) and the app recognizes the positions from the diagrams in the book.
I'm considering two ways different ways for the app:
After launching chessvision.ai for Chrome, I started receiving messages to make it available for Firefox.
After a quick research it turned out that porting it to Firefox is as easy as renaming a few Web API calls, so I quickly did it and there it is:
Running a service for chessvision.ai required having a Machine Learning model deployed in a production environment so that it can make predictions in real time upon user's request.
A few days before launching the chessvision.ai for Chrome I had almost everything covered, except one thing:
How to deploy my machine learning models for piece classification in a production environment?
We're just few days after launching chessvision.ai and people reached me out both privately and in the comments suggesting that it'd be nice to build a bot for r/chess that can work with the app and analyze chess images posted on Reddit.
All of us love the awesome u/ChessFenBot that was doing just that, but for some reason, it hasn't been working recently. Perhaps this is why I received some many request to make chessvision.ai working for that use case.
so from now u/chessvision-ai-bot will be pleased to serve you!
Finally it's ready to download - it's been a rough ride but so much fun.
People sometimes ask how did I get the idea for a browser extension that recognizes chess positions and how the algorithms work.
Here's the story.