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.
I got as far as a proof of concept trial. I wrote a program to simply read the data exchange file and delete the info from it after reading and displaying it. On the ARC side I made a couple of scripts. One to run a test of sending one text after another, and another script to process and send the texts to the same file.
It all worked okay but there has to be at least a 2 second delay between text sends from ARC for it all to work out. I don't think that will be a problem in this situation though. I'm kind of surprised it takes so long to reset the file for the next send. I might experiment with a virtual disk to perhaps speed that up. Maybe use another file monitor component in the external program as well. It seems to take about a half second or so for the one I'm using to recognize the file has changed. It works directly with the OS shell so I'm also surprised it takes that long.
Anyway, it would not take long to get something going. A couple of days maybe. I'm making it resizable so you can make it any size you wish. It will have a font selection button so that you can change the font, the font color, the font size and the usual (Underline, bold, strike through, Italics). I'm thinking about allowing some control characters to be sent as well to allow for the font properties to be set automatically. But that will come later after the basic program has been tried out and is working reliably. Of course there will be a clear screen button and you will be able to scroll back to past text as well. Anything else you can think of that would be good to have on it?
I also have a program I wrote some time ago to show pictures, videos, and gifs (though the gifs don't always do too well). I was thinking about using a variation of that to work on this same principle so you could send commands to have it show whatever visuals you like as well. It could stay up at least. Not have to close and open every time to show a new picture or whatever.
That's great. Thanks for the update WBS. I look forward to having a play with this when its ready.
>>@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.
@WBS00001, haha....very good question! I guess I assumed everyone knew I meant two way text chat with your EZ-Robot. So rather then speaking commands and requests you could type them.
@WBS.
Sorry, I forgot to say... no there's really nothing else I can think of at this stage. I think the proof of concept and trials you have so far will be great as it is. One little thing springs to mind though, is reading the text layout (however you would have it formatted) on a portrait screen, ie on a tablet, so you wouldn't have to manually side scroll the screen to read said text (useful if a tablet is installed in a robot in the portrait position).
@SteveG Wait ... you want to run this on a tablet? Windows 8 tablet I suppose? I've never tried any of my software on a windows 8 tablet so I have no idea if it will run. In theory it should. I guess I should send something soon, finished or not just to see if it will work.
That notwithstanding, the format should be easy enough since it will be fully resize-able so it should be possible to make it fit properly in either mode. I don't know what will happen when you switch between the two modes, however. I'll make it compact enough such that it all controls will show up under portrait mode. As far as not having to side scroll in portrait mode, I guess that would depend on the font size selected and you can choose whatever you want there. An alternative would be word wrap. I'll put in a check box to allow for either word wrap or not.
A question though, what is the X-Y resolution of the tablet? So I can make the startup size small enough to fit in that resolution (with room to spare, of course). I'd make it initially come up sized for portrait mode. Again I have no idea just how it will really appear. All we can do is try it on your device and see what happens and make adjustments from there.
I'll post something to the cloud later tonight or tomorrow just to run tests with.
Thank's my friend. Yeah, it's an Acer W3 that runs full Windows 8.1, so there shouldn't be any real difference. The w3 screen res is 1280 x 800.
@SteveG I have something ready to go for uploading but it seems you can only upload projects to the EZ Robots cloud. So I'll have to use another method. Any suggestions? Email? DropBox? FTP? What is good for you?
Hey WBS.
You could put it in the cloud, but You can email me if you like. My address is in my profile.