The `Interface` class

As mentioned in the Quickstart, the gr.Interface class is a high-level abstraction in Gradio that allows you to quickly create a demo for any Python function simply by specifying the input types and the output types. Revisiting our first demo:

$code_hello_world_4

We see that the Interface class is initialized with three required parameters:

fn: the function to wrap a user interface (UI) around
inputs: which Gradio component(s) to use for the input. The number of components should match the number of arguments in your function.
outputs: which Gradio component(s) to use for the output. The number of components should match the number of return values from your function.

In this Guide, we'll dive into gr.Interface and the various ways it can be customized, but before we do that, let's get a better understanding of Gradio components.

Gradio Components

Gradio includes more than 30 pre-built components (as well as many community-built custom components) that can be used as inputs or outputs in your demo. These components correspond to common data types in machine learning and data science, e.g. the gr.Image component is designed to handle input or output images, the gr.Label component displays classification labels and probabilities, the gr.LinePlot component displays line plots, and so on.

Components Attributes

We used the default versions of the gr.Textbox and gr.Slider, but what if you want to change how the UI components look or behave?

Let's say you want to customize the slider to have values from 1 to 10, with a default of 2. And you wanted to customize the output text field — you want it to be larger and have a label.

If you use the actual classes for gr.Textbox and gr.Slider instead of the string shortcuts, you have access to much more customizability through component attributes.

$code_hello_world_2 $demo_hello_world_2

Multiple Input and Output Components

Suppose you had a more complex function, with multiple outputs as well. In the example below, we define a function that takes a string, boolean, and number, and returns a string and number.

$code_hello_world_3 $demo_hello_world_3

Just as each component in the inputs list corresponds to one of the parameters of the function, in order, each component in the outputs list corresponds to one of the values returned by the function, in order.

An Image Example

Gradio supports many types of components, such as Image, DataFrame, Video, or Label. Let's try an image-to-image function to get a feel for these!

$code_sepia_filter $demo_sepia_filter

When using the Image component as input, your function will receive a NumPy array with the shape (height, width, 3), where the last dimension represents the RGB values. We'll return an image as well in the form of a NumPy array.

Gradio handles the preprocessing and postprocessing to convert images to NumPy arrays and vice versa. You can also control the preprocessing performed with the type= keyword argument. For example, if you wanted your function to take a file path to an image instead of a NumPy array, the input Image component could be written as:

gr.Image(type="filepath")

You can read more about the built-in Gradio components and how to customize them in the Gradio docs.

Example Inputs

You can provide example data that a user can easily load into Interface. This can be helpful to demonstrate the types of inputs the model expects, as well as to provide a way to explore your dataset in conjunction with your model. To load example data, you can provide a nested list to the examples= keyword argument of the Interface constructor. Each sublist within the outer list represents a data sample, and each element within the sublist represents an input for each input component. The format of example data for each component is specified in the Docs.

$code_calculator $demo_calculator

You can load a large dataset into the examples to browse and interact with the dataset through Gradio. The examples will be automatically paginated (you can configure this through the examples_per_page argument of Interface).

Continue learning about examples in the More On Examples guide.

Descriptive Content

In the previous example, you may have noticed the title= and description= keyword arguments in the Interface constructor that helps users understand your app.

There are three arguments in the Interface constructor to specify where this content should go:

title: which accepts text and can display it at the very top of interface, and also becomes the page title.
description: which accepts text, markdown or HTML and places it right under the title.
article: which also accepts text, markdown or HTML and places it below the interface.

Another useful keyword argument is label=, which is present in every Component. This modifies the label text at the top of each Component. You can also add the info= keyword argument to form elements like Textbox or Radio to provide further information on their usage.

gr.Number(label='Age', info='In years, must be greater than 0')

Additional Inputs within an Accordion

If your prediction function takes many inputs, you may want to hide some of them within a collapsed accordion to avoid cluttering the UI. The Interface class takes an additional_inputs argument which is similar to inputs but any input components included here are not visible by default. The user must click on the accordion to show these components. The additional inputs are passed into the prediction function, in order, after the standard inputs.

You can customize the appearance of the accordion by using the optional additional_inputs_accordion argument, which accepts a string (in which case, it becomes the label of the accordion), or an instance of the gr.Accordion() class (e.g. this lets you control whether the accordion is open or closed by default).

Here's an example:

$code_interface_with_additional_inputs $demo_interface_with_additional_inputs

The Interface class