thanks @PTP sorry this was my bad. The problem was the person who included quotation marks in a programmed response. This was neither your issue or ez-Robots. What were they thinking ...

I like the new previous response test variable as I get lost in where we are in the conversation. Are we in the middle of a conversation or starting a new one?

Wanna know the best option? Bluetooth earpiece they’re cheap and work really well. eBay or amazon for a few dollars and voila.

Just like the ones that cheesy real estate people where for their phone. Connects to your pc

I was actually going to use a Bluetooth hand held microphone. Had a lot of trouble with NAOs in the past in a crowded room doing demos. The robots built in mic’s pick up all the background noise so in a demo they don’t hear the commands. Hand held mic you can hand from person to person and the robot can only hear the person speaking.

PTP did some amaizing work on allowing you to configure DB levels and delays with the voice capture plugin he wrote so this makes it really easy to tune to the appropriate responses.

Yes the mics in the NAO is horrendous. One of the more well-know promotion images from the ALIZ-E project (fp7alizeproject.files.wordpress.com/2017/10/luther-nao-and-elias.jpg?w=658&h=439) features a child whispering into the "ear" of the robot. Basically, this is also the only way to get it to recognize anything without using external mics

@ptp I am not sure what I am doing wrong, the variables in V7 only pass the first time and then I am not getting any updates to variables when I use the plugin . Maybe it is me? not sure. If I manually set variables they work fine.

@Nink,

Which service / script is not assigning the variables ?

It was all of the services. I was using assistant at time move forward, move backward, robot dance etc and it suddenly stopped working. I closed ez-robot did not fix it but variables would assign first time but not second. Ez-robot also kept hanging So I had to restart it several times (kill process as could not exit app). If I assigned a variable by a script worked fine but not via plugin. I must admit I did not test with other plugins (only Watson running).

Eventually I restarted my windows VM and problem went away. 8GB assigned to Windows only ez-robot running in VM (MAC Parralels) I will monitor today. Maybe I will try running native Win 10 and ez-robot on a Bare metal PC.

Seems to be behaving for me today so hopefully was just my PC. One other question, Occasionally I send no data to Watson using Speech to text (background noise etc) but it causes the Speech to text to stop.