When I was a kid, the gadgets in any given movie or TV show were the real stars. John Connor's handheld Atari, Marty McFly's self-lacing Nikes, and about a million different variations on the radio watch were what I dreamed of owning one day. So I feel a certain kinship with YouTuber Abe's Projects, who took his love for fictional gadgets one step further and made a real version of the Pokedex from the Pokemon cartoon. If you weren't the right age in the late 90s, the Pokedex is a handheld computer riffing on the Palm Pilots of the day. Its sole purpose is to identify and catalog Pokemon creatures in the wild.

Today, we're going to take this trained Keras model and deploy it to an iPhone and iOS app using what Apple has dubbed "CoreML", an easy-to-use machine learning framework for Apple applications: My goal today is to show you how simple it is to deploy your Keras model to your iPhone and iOS using CoreML. To be clear, I'm not a mobile developer by any stretch of the imagination, and if I can do it, I'm confident you can do it as well. Feel free to use the code in today's post as a starting point for your own application. But personally, I'm going to continue the theme of this series and build a Pokedex. A Pokedex is a device that exists in the world of Pokemon, a popular TV show, video game, and trading card series (I was/still am a huge Pokemon nerd). Using a Pokedex you can take a picture of a Pokemon (animal-like creatures that exist in the world of Pokemon) and the Pokedex will automatically identify the creature for for you, providing useful information and statistics, such as the Pokemon's height, weight, and any special abilities it may have. You can see an example of a Pokedex in action at the top of this blog post, but again, feel free to swap out my Keras model for your own -- the process is quite simple and straightforward as you'll see later in this guide.

An example of a Pokedex (thank you to Game Trader USA for the Pokedex template!) When I was a kid, I was a huge Pokemon nerd. I collected the trading cards, played the Game Boy games, and watched the TV show. If it involved Pokemon, I was probably interested in it. Pokemon made a lasting impression on me -- and looking back, Pokemon may have even inspired me to study computer vision.