Looking to trying later today. How does it compare to Winblows?

Windows speech rec works perfectly for me why pay for google?

Google is better at speaker independent (ie, untrained) recognition, and handles accents better and more languages. If you are the only one talking to the robot, and take the time to train Microsoft, it is quite good, but if you want a robot that can interact with strangers, then Google (or Nuance cloud product, which costs more but is even better) may be worth spending on.

Alan

It certainly doesnt work well for me, unfortunately, and google works near perfect. I am referring to the pandorabot service only though. all due respect to anyone who may cite mic issues as the problem but google works with all of my mics and microsoft terribly with all of them. As i mentioned on another post, microsoft works fine for my predefined voice commands, it just falls apart with natural conversation ie Pandorabots. The mics i have tried are 3 different headset mics of varying quality but all decent, a handheld stage mic which cost far too much money, the internal laptop mic, and a mic that came with an old playstation SingStar game(works as well or better than other mic...with google only. This is just my experience but for me it depends on how u plan to use the service. Like what TheTechGuru said but far more bleak outlook on Windoze service. :D

Yikes i should add that Dj suggested a lav mic for good results with microsoft. I have very little knowledge of what a lav mic is...yet but i did think that just meant a clip on speaking mic. I will look into that as well cuz free is always nice.

@williamk so you get better results with pandorabots?

Far better. No comparison.

Sorry i should have added that i tested the google service with pandorabots in myrobotlab before the ez plugin was added which is why im very excited to see said plugin arrive . Im just adding this because it seems other users have had different results and i havent had a chance yet to test the google service in ARC. I will be tonight. I cant imagine how the results would differ in ARC though. I think im correct on this...that google is an idependent service and therefore results should be identical in ARC and myrobotlab.

The microphone on my laptop is absolutely terrible - it's probably the worst microphone ever made. Which is sad, because it's a serious power-house of a laptop, but they cheaped out on the mic. Or, perhaps they simply forgot to put a microphone in mine, and instead there's an old carrot in its place.

Anyway, using Google Speech is actually a little better on my laptop than the Windows speech recognition. It's still not perfect, but that's most likely due to my carrot.

I updated the Google Speech plugin to include a variable and script, so you can connect it to the PandoraBot control. Details are included in the plugin here: https://synthiam.com/redirect/legacy?table=plugin&id=176

My carrot is working better as well and fantastic with better external mic. Inmoov is alive! He 's chatting my ear off this is exciting stuff.

Im fairly certain i will not sleep tonight. Just coffee and good conversation lol Thats how great this is! Ok ive kinda said that already but wow, what a terrific implementation. This has been my goal since the very first thought of building a robot and a half dozen arduinos, several beaglebones, 2 raspberry pi's, a ton of time, effort, and study later on this very evening it has been achieved finally to my satisfaction with 1 Ezb! Did i say wow yet 'cuz WOW! :D

Those are real nice words! Thank u Tell the world!

Thank you, Mr. Sures. This effort by you and your team has spoke volumes to me regarding the importance of your users needs, to you. You've managed to make a cynical consumer who questions everything, a customer...better yet a fan and ezb user for life. Is that better than a customer? lol i think it is. I will indeed, spread the word. :)

Well I'm super excited to try pandorabot with Alan now. I kinda gave up but this should reinvigorate me... until the 60 days runs out :/

I don't think it'll be very costly to pay for google speech for individuals.

60 Minutes per month is free, even after the 60 days.

And on top of that, it's $0.006 per minute.

So $20 will give you 3,333 minutes - not terrible

Oh, i should add - that's the reason why there is a RECORD button, rather than always recording. It will help keep the cost down (and bandwidth).

Yep pretty reasonable.

@fxrtst Speaking of Alan, when is he going to be available to purchase? I assume that is still the plan? I think someone mentioned you were going to offer the stl files to purchase? That would be super. Its a beautiful creation and i would love to try my hand at making one.

you should try the Bing one - wow, it's easier to setup and absolutely amazing results: https://synthiam.com/redirect/legacy?table=plugin&id=179

Blows away the google service!

Odd, i didnt even know bing voice existed. Im getting at least 90 percent accuracy with google but it nots perfect so I'll give bing a try,sounds promising.

%%%Radio edit ^#&@ Theres that word again..perfect lol im sure nothing will work perfectly at this point in time but if bing is better than google then its a step in the right direction. Im personally gonna give it a try.

Exciting. If I don't use Panderbots is there a way to get this VR to trigger other scripts in ARC?

@williamk, hopefully not too long. There will now be 4 robots that can be built. I'm working on the Avengers film( flying back and forth) and working on an amazing project surrounding Alan that I can't talk about at the moment. So a lot going on. Doing my best to multitask. But these projects will delay the release a bit longer ! And yes I will be releasing them as STL files to begin with.

@Dave Schulpius that's what Blockly or EZ-Script is for. You can use either to write programs to do things. For example, you can have a bunch of IF conditions to detect that was spoken

Blockly

EZ-Script

if ($BingSpeech = "How are you?")

  SayEZB("I am fine. Thank you.")

elseif ($BingSpeech = "Thank you.")

  SayEZB("Nice!")

else

  SayEZB("I did not understand that statement.")

endif

Find more about EZ-Script in the activities section of the learn page on this website. Here is a direct link to activities: https://synthiam.com/Tutorials/Course/6

@fxrtst Nice, i'm very much looking forward to the release of the files. Might be too early to say but do you have a rough idea of the printer bed size required for the project? Right now i have a 200×200×180 bed. Also this other Alan project sounds intriguing..my curiosity is peaked. :)

I have optimized the files for the Robo R1 Plus. Its bed size is 9 x 8x 10 inches. Every part can be built without being sliced into smaller parts. Of course if your bed is smaller, then slice away, But very important that it all lines up correct or very easy to get things miss matched like the jaw with the face, etc. Also i suggest a non warping material like PETG. ABS shrinks and warps too much to get the parts to line up. PETG is my new favorite filament. PLA is great too just don't leave your ALAN in a hot car :)

I dont have any promotional stuff with Robo, but I will say that for $600 its absolutely the easiest to use printer ive owned. Prints consistant, autolevels etc. Included with the slt purchase are the factory beds. That is if you have simplify 3D and a Robo, you just load the files and hit print. I've optimized the supports and printer settings.

Getting off topic....but head over to the ALAN thread for updates.

Thank you, this is great information and i will check out the threads. Good luck with this amazing project.