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Version: 4.0.0

Age estimation

Phonexia age-estimation is a tool for estimating the age of a speaker appearing in a voiceprint or audio. To learn more, visit the technology's home page.

Installation​

Getting age estimation docker image​

You can easily obtain the age estimation docker image from docker hub. Just run:

docker pull phonexia/age-estimation:latest

Running the image​

Docker​

You can start the microservice and list all the supported options by running:

docker run --rm -it phonexia/age-estimation:latest --help

The output should look like this:


age-estimation [OPTIONS]


OPTIONS:
  -h,     --help              Print this help message and exit 
  -m,     --model file REQUIRED (Env:PHX_MODEL_PATH) 
                              Path to a model file. 
  -k,     --license_key string REQUIRED (Env:PHX_LICENSE_KEY) 
                              License key. 
  -a,     --listening_address address [[::]]  (Env:PHX_LISTENING_ADDRESS) 
                              Address on which the server will be listening. Address '[::]' 
                              also accepts IPv4 connections. 
  -p,     --port number [8080]  (Env:PHX_PORT) 
                              Port on which the server will be listening. 
  -l,     --log_level level:{error,warning,info,debug,trace} [info]  (Env:PHX_LOG_LEVEL) 
                              Logging level. Possible values: error, warning, info, debug, 
                              trace. 
          --keepalive_time_s number:[0, max_int] [60]  (Env:PHX_KEEPALIVE_TIME_S) 
                              Time between 2 consecutive keep-alive messages, that are sent if 
                              there is no activity from the client. If set to 0, the default 
                              gRPC configuration (2hr) will be set (note, that this may get the 
                              microservice into unresponsive state). 
          --keepalive_timeout_s number:[1, max int] [20]  (Env:PHX_KEEPALIVE_TIMEOUT_S) 
                              Time to wait for keep alive acknowledgement until the connection 
                              is dropped by the server. 
          --device TEXT:{cpu,cuda} [cpu]  (Env:PHX_DEVICE) 
                              Compute device used for inference. 
          --num_threads_per_instance NUM (Env:PHX_NUM_THREADS_PER_INSTANCE) 
                              Number of threads per instance (applies to CPU processing only). 
                              Use N CPU threads in the microservice for each request. Number of 
                              threads is automatically detected if set to 0. 
          --num_instances_per_device NUM:UINT > 0 (Env:PHX_NUM_INSTANCES_PER_DEVICE) 
                              Number of instances per device (both CPU and GPU processing). 
                              Microservice can process requests concurrently if value is >1. 
          --device_index ID (Env:PHX_DEVICE_INDEX) 
                              Device identifier
note

The model and license_key options are required. To obtain the model and license, contact Phonexia.

You can specify the options either via command line arguments or via environmental variables.

Run the container with the mandatory parameters:

docker run --rm -it -v /opt/phx/models:/models -p 8080:8080 phonexia/age-estimation:latest --model /models/age_estimation-xl-5.1.0.model --license_key ${license-key}

Replace the /opt/phx/models, age_estimation-xl-5.1.0.model and license-key with the corresponding values.

With this command, the container will start, and the microservice will be listening on port 8080 on localhost.

Microservice communication​

gRPC API​

For communication, our microservices use gRPC, which is a high-performance, open-source Remote Procedure Call (RPC) framework that enables efficient communication between distributed systems using a variety of programming languages. We use an interface definition language to specify a common interface and contracts between components. This is primarily achieved by specifying methods with parameters and return types.

Take a look at our gRPC API documentation. The age-estimation microservice defines a AgeEstimation service with remote procedures called Estimate. This procedure accepts an argument (also referred to as "message") called EstimateRequest, which contains an array of voiceprints or audio. This EstimateRequest argument is streamed, meaning that it may be received in multiple requests, each containing a part of the voiceprints or audio. Once all requests have been received and processed, the Estimate procedure returns a message called EstimateResponse, which consists of the resulting array of EstimateResult messages that correspond to each voiceprint or audio on the input (the array will only contain one EstimateResult when estimating directly from audio). The result has a TODO.

Connecting to microservice​

There are multiple ways how you can communicate with our microservices.

Phonexia Python client​

The easiest way to get started with testing is to use our simple Python client. To get it, run:

pip install phonexia-age-estimation-client

After the successful installation, run the following command to see the client options:

age_estimation_client --help

Versioning​

We use Semantic Versioning.