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.
Let me see if I understand. What you want is to display (in larger text) whatever the robot says via a SayEZB or SayEZBWait command. Is that right?
@WBS.
Not quite right buddy. I don't want to use the "Say" commands (although this could actually be useful also), it's more about showing the Pandorabots responses.
Ok. I take it you are using the Pandorabot control then. And it, somehow, sends it's responses to the robot or PC. What's needed is a way to find or intercept those strings for display I take it. Or am I still off?
Looking at the Pandorabot control I see it has check boxes for where to send the responses, none of which is "send to a variable." Even if it had that there would still be the problem of displaying it. Would probably have to send it to an external program for actual display. The Script language doesn't even have anything for sending a variable to a script control (or reading from a Script control). Not even to a Notepad control. All of which would be handy.
I also looked at the Variable Watcher control to see if some system global variables were listed that might have been related to the Pandorabot controls, but, alas, nothing. I'm afraid I'm at a loss at the moment.
What is needed is a companion control to the Pandorabot control (and perhaps others) that can be used for displaying the response. Possible but not to likely to happen any time soon. Like you say, that would really be helpful to the hard of hearing or the profoundly deaf. The next best could be being able to enlarge the font size in the debug portion.
@WBS.
You've pretty much nailed what I'm asking. Yeah Pandorabot is the main control that I'm looking at, although this would be useful for any speech coming from the robot.
The idea of being able to resize the debug font would be a possible solution, but I'm hesitant to ask for this as a feature request as staff participation on the forum has been very quiet recently to say the least, so this request could easily go unnoticed which would be a shame not just not my situation, but for others who know someone (or even themselves) with hearing problems.
You can see why I'm at a loss to think of a way to parse this information for it to be displayed. On the surface, this seems like something simple (computers with a screen do it all the time), but thinking how it would all go together shows that it may not be so simple.
Yes, there seems to be no ready solution to the Pandora problem.
That notwithstanding, if you are interested in displaying strings you would also be sending to be spoken via SAY type commands (or anything else), I could help there. I don't know what software tools you have at your disposal so my help may not be needed, but I thought I'd offer. I can write a simple program that would display that text. I would see it as working from text file update sent by a script. The Script language does have several commands for reading and writing to a file at least. Would even be possible to send formatting commands if desired. It could even be started and stopped from a script via the Script Exec command as you did before.
Thanks for your kind offer. I don't know what sort of software tools I would need or indeed how to use them if I had them. I'm more about building and electronics. Networking and software... confused, which about somes it up for me, lol. Let me know what you have in mind or show me an example and I'll see if it could be something I could wrap my head around.
Thanks for the help.
Ok, be happy to do it for you. I've been working on programs to manipulate ARC data already. One that extracts the Speech Recognition data from the .EZB file and allows you to do things like alphabetize it, search it, do some editing or moving around, etc. Things you can't do in ARC. Then merges it back into the project from which it was taken. Even can save the data in a separate file for recall later. I'm figuring I can use that to load up different sets of phrases as desired. Could even have different sets of the same phrases (and scripts) for various languages or applications. Anyway, point is I've already been working with this stuff external to ARC, so what you want isn't starting from scratch for me. I can use the same base but with different bells and whistles. E-Z P-Z 1,2,3-Z!
One quick question, are you running Windows 7 or 8?
That's great, thank you. It's Windows 8.1 I'm working with.