What's New in Gradio 4.0?

The speaker, Abu Bakr Abid, leader of the Gradio team at Hugging Face, welcomes everyone to the Gradio 4.0 launch event. He expresses excitement to share updates on the team's work over the past few months, focusing on how the community has been using Gradio and the incredible applications built with it. The goal is to introduce new features that will enhance the platform's usability and functionality, based on user feedback and observed trends in the community's application of Gradio.

Abu Bakr Abid discusses the historical context of machine learning, highlighting the shift from niche, specialized applications to widespread accessibility. He credits the Transformers library and Gradio for democratizing access to machine learning models, enabling non-experts to engage with and utilize these models. The speaker emphasizes the importance of demos in not only increasing machine learning's accessibility but also in revealing biases within models and refocusing research on user utility. He positions Gradio as a key tool in this mission, allowing developers to easily create demos and share them with a broad audience.

The speaker explains the challenges developers face when building demos for machine learning models, such as learning multiple technologies and managing web hosting. Gradio was created to simplify this process, enabling anyone to build a GUI for their models with just a few lines of Python code. The speaker outlines the basic usage of Gradio, highlighting its ability to handle multiple requests and create public links for easy sharing. He also mentions the success of Gradio, with 50,000 unique monthly active developers and over 15 million Gradio apps built and launched.

The speaker introduces Gradio 4.0, emphasizing the team's commitment to enabling users to customize their apps and providing robust foundational components. The new version allows for the creation of custom components, improved media components, enhanced accessibility, and the introduction of server-side events. The speaker also discusses the integration of best practices for accessibility and the excitement around the potential for community-driven innovation with the new version.

Pete, a team member, delves into the details of creating custom components in Gradio 4.0. He explains the demand for bespoke interfaces and how custom components address this need. The process involves using Python for the backend and Svelte for the frontend, with Gradio's components serving as a starting point. Pete outlines the concepts of static and interactive variants, the importance of pre- and post-processing, and the role of examples in custom components. He emphasizes the community's role in enriching Gradio with diverse and innovative custom components.

Freddy, another team member, walks through the process of creating a custom Gradio component for displaying map data using the Python library Folium. He explains the use of the Gradio CLI tool 'gradio cc' for scaffolding the project, the structure of backend and frontend code, and the implementation of events, data models, preprocessing, and postprocessing. Freddy also demonstrates how to test the component locally and build it into a package that can be shared and installed by others.

Hannah, a frontend developer, discusses the refreshed media components in Gradio 4.0, including new features such as video trimming, source selection for different input types, and waveform views for audio components. She highlights the improvements in user experience, accessibility, and the addition of min and max length parameters for audio and video components. Hannah emphasizes the team's commitment to making Gradio more accessible and the ongoing efforts to improve it.

Ali talks about the changes in communication protocols between the Gradio frontend and backend in version 4.0. He explains the shift from HTTP post requests and websockets to server-side events, which offer better device support, handling, and integration with other technologies. Ali also discusses the unification of the queuing mechanism, allowing for finer control over the number of workers dedicated to each task, preventing different event types from blocking each other.

The speaker introduces the ability to use custom share servers in Gradio 4.0, allowing users to host their Gradio apps on their own domains. This feature opens up the possibility for personalized sharing links and longer-lasting demos without the 72-hour limit of the Gradio share server. The team has open-sourced the share server code, providing full control over the setup and the ability to adjust settings like timeouts as needed.

The Gradio team concludes the presentation by inviting questions and discussing additional features in Gradio 4.0 such as support for JavaScript functions, improved file security, and control over meta tags. They mention the availability of a written guide for creating custom components and the upcoming release of Gradio Light compatible with Gradio 4.0. The team encourages users to reach out on Twitter and Discord for further assistance and to stay tuned for more updates and features.