
Show HN: Kur by Deepgram (YC S16) – Deep Learning Made Easy - stephensonsco
http://kur.deepgram.com
======
stephensonsco
Deepgram is open sourcing Kur
([http://kur.deepgram.com](http://kur.deepgram.com))! Kur is the worlds first
descriptive Deep Learning software. Think of a model, describe it in a simple
YAML or JSON file, and train to get state-of-the-art results. There's no need
to code.

Why we built Kur: Prototyping DNNs is a slow process. Most people doing deep
learning want to iterate and try out different model architectures and learn
from others. It's hard to do this using barebones backends like
TensorFlow/Theano or even the higher abstraction of software like Keras.

Kur is not speech specific. It can be used for images (we supply two
examples), speech (we supply one example and DG is open sourcing a new audio
dataset with it, the DEEPGRAM10), text, etc.

There are CNN layers, RNN, dense, dropout, batch norm, etc. to pick and choose
from. The best part? Kur does all the plumbing! You want one input but two
outputs? Not a problem, describe that model in Kur!

We're really pumped to be releasing Kur and would love to answer questions if
you've got em.

Thanks! Deepgram AI Research Team

[http://kur.deepgram.com](http://kur.deepgram.com)
[http://github.com/deepgram/kur](http://github.com/deepgram/kur)
[http://kurhub.com](http://kurhub.com)

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Eridrus
There have been a few frameworks that take this declarative approach; DSSTNE,
Twitter's internal framework and probably others.

DSSTNE had a clearish reason for doing so: automatic model-parallel training.
Twitter wanted something simpler than Torch for most of their devs to use.

But I'm not really seeing why you guys did it.

~~~
wrsh07
Didn't they say "faster prototyping"?

That seems sane to me.

~~~
Eridrus
I guess I just don't think that's true, Keras is already pretty easy to use
for model definition, and this doesn't seem to solve any actual pain points
I've encountered.

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lucidrains
Nice job! I want to see another RNN net generate the yaml configs after we
have collected enough of them for training. :)

~~~
stephensonsco
You'll be able to easily do that once we release Kurhub.com.

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p1esk
Great idea! However installation instructions are a little misleading. It says
I only need Python 3, while in reality I need a whole bunch of things to be
installed already. Is there a list of all requirements?

Also, does it work on Windows? "DL for dummies" code should run on Windows :)

~~~
tedmiston
The "whole bunch of things" is just the standard system-wide install for
working with any Python package: python, pip (which comes with python), and
virtualenv. Though I also recommend virtualenvwrapper for setup simplicity.

~~~
stephensonsco
Great point about virtualenvwrapper. We've included that too in the
installation instruction.

The install instructions are pretty much structured as: quick,

    
    
      pip install kur
    

cleaner and quick,

    
    
      install with vituralenv in a quick script
    

best practice but more setup,

    
    
      install a whole environment and include virtualenvwrapper

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mrg3_2013
Looks very interesting! Particularly because I don't know NNs and would love
to be able to get a feel for it. I'll give it a try this weekend and share my
noob experience

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lordvissu
Need updates for installation on Windows. Been trying for more than a day now.
-_-

