Massey Speech Project for
Key words: Speech synthesis, speech recognition, smart house, windows 7,vista.
This software is for entertainment or educational purposes - not for sale or
commercial purposes. This software is given "as is" and without any
warranty, express or implied, including but not limited to non-infringement of
third party rights, performance or merchantability. This program is given free
without any express or implied warranties whatsoever. Because of the diversity
of conditions and hardware under which this program may be used, no warranty of
fitness for a particular purpose is offered. The user is advised to test the
program thoroughly before relying on it. The user must assume the entire risk
of using the program. The author will assume no liability for any direct,
indirect, incidental or consequential damages resulting from the use of this
software, including loss or interruption of business, accidental loss of data,
or damage to computer equipment, or for any claim by a third party.
Microsoft Agent
Page
Windows 7 and
See a Youtube demo of this
program in action
Download the program here.
Download this file to say the desktop or somewhere else, and click on the icon
to install Vista Speech project. A shortcut will be automatically made to the
desktop. Instructions for use:
The source is here too.
Freely use, but please acknowledge that I at least stuck all the bits together!
I would also like to hear from people who have improved the program. I will
post any improvements here with full acknowledgement. Download
the source here. (in VB.NET)
To get the program to listen make sure your
hear me
These are
the key words to start the recognition and the big LED will light up on the
front circular panel.
To stop
listening say
don't listen
Everything
else you have full control over. You can define your own words in the
vocabulary and computer replies. There are a whole range of actions such as
searching for mp3 files,video files,text files. The system supports X-10
devices and so you can program it to turn on the bedroom light for example.
NOTE: Make
sure your windows
(I know this sounds rich from a Scot but
I couldn't get it to work on British English yet!) The error will be that the
main form does not appear circular as it should (see the pic) and the program
will not function.
Searching the internet by
voice:
You will
need to train the Vita speech recognition system if you want to do this. This
may take some time on your behalf as the computer gets better at understanding
your voice.
Try to
speak clearly like a newscaster. Once you have trained your computer you can
then issue this command:
Question and then say (for example) What is the distance from
The
computer (assuming it recognised your voice ok otherwise it will search for
whatever rubbish it put in place of what it thought you said!) will then
contact the MIT START page and
submit your
question. A web page will then
appear with the answer. The computer will download this page and convert it to
text (so-called screen scraping) and speak the answer.Note, on some PCs you will get an annoying pop-up error
message with _gat appearing in it. This can be overcome by doing the following in Internet Explorer: Try Reset all all zones to default levelby doing Internet explorer > internet
options > Security.
Then in Internet options > Advanced choose restore advanced settings.This should fix it.
In
converting to text the program must get rid of various tags due to HTML.
The reason
that you must train the recognition engine for this task is simply that for the
other commands that you may put in (or that already in) the computer only has
this relatively short list to select from.
When you
ask a general question this is a different ball game altogether and the
computer must go into dictation mode (ie the full dictionary instead of a
limited grammar as was the case for commands).
This is why
people often ask me “How come you get such good results for
recognition”. Well it’s because for a smarthouse you only need a
relatively short list of commands. If you want to dictate a letter then things
get harder. This is the same for AI chatterboxes which I may put in at a later
date (as with the XP version).
Artificial Intelligence
Is there
really such a thing? I used the
If I ask it
how far it is to the Sun it can get that information too of course from the
internet search (see above). If I asked it to solve an unsolved problem it
would give me a daft answer.
So AI is in
its infancy and has been for some time.
Anyway,
here is what you have all been waiting for: The ALICE engine and Vista Speech
Recognition. I have put it all in the latest version which can be downloaded
below. To chat with the ALICE engine say: Let's chat and to end the converstaion and return to commands say: End Chat.
You MUST TRAIN the Microsoft Vista speech recognizer for this of course. The more training the better. In fact if you want more accuracy
it is a good idea to buy the Windows Speech Recognition Toolkit.Go to this link for the WSR Toolkit which will let you do custom training to the Vista Speech recognition engine.
Download the Artificial Intelligence (Executable) version of the program here Just unrar and click on the .exe Icon (Vista Speech Projec.exe).You can create your own shortcut to this file of course.
Here is the screen you will get when it is run.
This
source is compressed in rar format though you can run the executable in the debug directory.
I have had
a lot of questions as to where to buy SAPI5 text to speech voices of quality.
Here is my list: Cepstral Voices are very good as are AT & T voices. At
& T also support SAPI4 as well as SAPI5 but we don't need SAPI4 for this
application. (we do for the XP version). If you are Scottish or especially
English (!) I recommend Cereproc's Scottish voice Heather. The best I have ever
heard and free to academic institutes if it is for non-profit making
activities. (which mine is). Here is some more help:
Massey Vista Speech Project Help. Warning - this program WILL NOT work under
any circumstances in Windows XP. For information:Download
the AIML dll source here (written in c#.net).
Here is another version of the same program. Many think it doesn't look as good but taste is relative!
Here is yet another version of the same program.You can click on the executable or re-compile the source. The executable is in the bin/release folder.
Click here for detailed help on running this application.
Some basic help to get the program running.
1.Make sure
that your speech recognition language is set to US English. The program will
not run on UK English or any other language at present.
It
won’t be too difficult to change this however.
2.You may
have to disable the UAC – User activated control to get the program to
work for some PCs (especially in Windows 7).
3. You can
download the source and run the .exe file in the bin/debug directory and this
always works if you have trouble!
Good luck
and I would like to know how you get on with the program.
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Tel: +64 9 414 0800 ext 9805 |