Resolved by WBS00001!
A bit of an unusual request, but there is reasoning behind what I'm about to ask. So my question is...
Is there a way to display a robots spoken response as text with ARC?
Let me explain. Speech synthesis for a robots response is not an option here. You speak to a robot using speech recognition and the robot responds with text displayed on the computer screen. Now using the Pandorabot control will do this showing the robots response in the debug window, but the text is too small.
If your familiar with Pandorabot, you'll know that when you have a published bot, you get your own page where your Pandorabots response is displayed and you can add HTML code to change the text layout. This is something like what I'm looking to do via ARC. I could use the Pandorabot portal, but I would need control commands which are imbedded in the bots responses to activate when the response is given.
The reasoning behind this, is for someone who is hard of hearing to interact and converse with the robot, so you see why speech synthesis can't really be used in this situation. I might be overlooking something obvious here, or there might be something that I'm unaware of, so ANY input anyone can offer on this really would be gratefully appreciated.
Cheers,
Steve.
This would be a great new feature for DJ to add to the list. A text results box that displays variable contents with formatting.
Until or unless that comes as a feature, I see two ways to do this, both requiring some custom coding.
One would be as wbs00001 proposes in having EZ-B write to a file and than custom code display the file contents with whatever formatting you add.
The other would be to use the SDK to write a listener for a specific variable and then display the variable with formatting.
In either case you could either put a timer to remove the display after a pre-set interval, or just have new text over-write old text (or scroll it so the user can scroll back through responses if they come too fast).
Unfortunately, I don't have the time to work on either idea, but maybe wbs00001 or one of the other experienced developers could throw something together.
[edit] whoops, I was typing while wbs00001 was answering. Looks like a solution is incoming....
Alan
@Alan.
Thanks for your response. It would be great if DJ would consider adding this to ARC for those who can't use speech synth. The scrolling idea would be good. That way a user could posit backtrack to view what was previously said similar to what iOS Siri does. If it was SDK based, I would probably struggle with it (never used it).
Anyway as you say, it looks like @WBS just might have a good solution for this.
If I ever have some free time I am going to take some C# lessons to get my skills up to speed with modern programming (I was handy with VB6, but have been doing architecture but not actual programming since then). Once I have the skills, I will be doing a lot of extensions and integrations to ARC with the SDK.
Alan
Hey SteveG, I asked about this same feature over a year ago. I wanted it for the same reason as you. I was planning to make a small external app for this and make it two way communication for text like a chat screen.
@Justin.
That's interesting. I wondered if someone else might have asked about this (to be honest, I didn't do a forum search before I asked). I'm surprised this has not been implemented in to ARC already, especially as you asked over a year ago, as this really would be a valuable tool to have for the reasons we have stated. Do you reckon you'll give your app a go one day?
@SteveG Well, DJ is back and he has hit the ground running after some time off to recharge. He has been a fireman, going around and putting out one fire after another on the forum. Including the bug I recently posted about. He also said he has a re-write of ARC. Now I wonder if it's going to be worth the effort to do this. He may already have something like that or soon will due to the chat in this thread and, apparently, threads which have gone before. It doesn't seem it would take a whole lot to do if done within ARC itself. What do you think?
@JustinRatliff Sounds like you had interesting ideas on this with the 2-way chat thing. If you don't mind saying, I'm wondering what you meant by that? Chatting with who? Thanks.
Yes leaving it for a couple of weeks or so to see what will be new in ARC sounds like a good idea. It would be great to hear from DJ to see what his thoughts are on this subject, or if he has plans to implement this, as apart from us guys who have posted here, I'm sure there are many other membership potential customers who would welcome an addition such as this.
I just wanted to bump this thread so it doesn't get lost of forgotten about. Looking at the new ARC release, there doesn't look like anything has been implemented in regards to this subject, although the new plug-in idea could be used for this I guess (although I wouldn't know how to do it).
@WBS.
In regards to Justin's post about two way conversation, I think he meant a user chatting with the robot. I know we said about leaving this for a bit to see what the new release would bring, but I wanted to ask how far you got with what you were working on for this?