Microsoft Lobe is a free desktop app allowing anyone to create a machine learning model

Back in 2018, Microsoft announced the acquisition of Lobe, an AI-made-easy company that offered a simple visual interface allowing people to easily create intelligent apps that can understand hand gestures, hear music, read handwriting, and more, without writing a single line of code. Lobe makes machine learning easier for people to use and helps them train models without writing code. After two years of the acquisition, Microsoft today announced the public preview of Lobe.

Lobe is available as a desktop app for both Windows and Mac. And it uses open-source machine learning architectures and transfer learning to train custom machine learning models on the user’s own machine. The current version of Lobe learns to look at images using image classification – categorizing an image into a single label overall. Microsoft is also working to expand to more types of problems and data in future versions.

It is important to note that Lobe doesn’t require an internet connection or logins. Right now, Lobe will only output the machine learning model. Microsoft Lobe team is working on a collection of apps and tools to help run your model without any code.

“Lobe is taking what is a sophisticated and complex piece of technology and making it actively fun,” said Bill Barnes, manager for Lobe. “What we find is that it inspires people. It fills them with confidence that they can actually use machine learning. And when you have confidence you become more creative and start looking around and asking ‘What other stuff can I do with this?’”

You can learn more about Lobe here.