Mickey666Maus
Hey guys,
I have been trying to figure out how to build my robot and still haven't made up my mind completely...which might also be an ongoing thing, it seems like the more options I discover the more ideas I get on what I would like to build!
My latest investigation goes to the idea of whether or not giving my robot the ability to speak...there are a lot of very good role models for robots just communicating via sound or even just motion, and we are still able to establish good emotional relationship if they are just triggering the right feelings!
But obviously not all of us would really understand what R2D2 would try to tell us, for most of us are not C3PO...so I was checking a few TTS engines, fixed the Windows 10 problem on speech engines, thanks to Steve G and got quiet a bit of testing!
So how far did you guys get with this...is this a good road to take or will I get stuck with some mediocre Siri/Cortana that is kind of tiring to listen to?
Is there any way to connect ARC to a web service doing better TTS than the windows one topped up with a Cepstral or Ivona voice?
Did you guys try or find a hack for that Amazon Echo thing or Ubi, or is it a waste of time?
Also for me being German it's kind of a tricky thing to get going because there is no mixed speech narrator on windows...it's always one or the other, so switching languages will always have me to go into the system settings and reconfigure the location!
So this is not a specific question...I would just like to know if anyone was also interested in solving this and which way you guys went in the end!
Don’t call me a mindless philosopher, you overweight glob of grease! would be great to hear from my robot too, but if I'd end up building something that says Beep bop boop beep beep beep. I would not mind it either! 
Hey @Mickey666Maus
Thanks for sharing you thoughts!
Yeah, text to speech (TTS) is still a area of robotics that is a "work in progress".
I believe Siri, Cortana, Iris, and ARC with Cepstral TTS voices is as good as it gets at this moment in time. There are no Amazon Echo or Ubi hacks that I am aware of.
As an alternative solution, in ARC you could always have your robot respond with sound clips, much like Bumblebee in the Transformers live action movie. In the past, I've used movie sound bites to have my robot respond with Arnold Schwarzenegger quotes lol.
It looks to me that you are very passionate about "language" in general, so I would challenge you to do the research to see if there is something better out there or, even greater in my opinion, create something better!
Cool things have been done with automated phone system menus, maybe you could leverage software from that field? Just thinking out loud.
As for your language selection question, I'm wondering if you could write a batch file that can quickly change system languages by simply double clicking it? Anyone have experience with this? Maybe it could be made into an ARC plug-in.
Hey, yes I am doing some research on how to connect things within or outside of the ARC....I am seriously bad at coding so I'll just try to find the right bits an pieces to see if I can find the some wires to connect! There are some Twitter chatbots with different personality and also this ai app that lets you connect an IFTTT channel called Moni.ai!
Something in ARC that lets you change the system language would be awesome, because voice recognition also gets messed up if you try to speak english into a system that is set up for another language!
Well I guess I will also tend to use some sounds or some pre-recorded samples to start the interaction with my robot...it seems like some creature that is pleasant to chat with is out of reach at the moment, but lets see.....it seems like progress is on it's way and some big companys devoted themselfes to get us of the keyboard and talk to our devices!
Thanks for sharing your opinion on this Jeremie
moni.ai/