United Kingdom
Asked — Edited

Internet Connectivity &Amp; Data Retrieval

Hi guys,

It's something that deuel18 dropped into a thread that got dismissed because it was way off topic, but I thought it really warranted its own topic as it was an awesome question ....

As our V4 robots will be connected via wifi to routers .... In turn with access to the web, rather than just being able to access on board camera etc over the net for remote presence etc, can we use the data on the net for more powerful use with our robots?

So for example, we can talk to our robots and this data goes back to out pc for e.g. movement commands or to trigger a routine, but what if the command was something like "what is tomorrow's weather in Bristol", or "who is the president of the United States" etc. As deuel18 suggested it would be kind of a link to some kind of voice recognition/search results akin to Siri ?

All of a sudden, our robots would be able to answer us with dynamic responses rather than just a response that was predetermined and probably quite repetitive.

I had experience before with something that I use a lot - Homeseer automation software. With that, it can recognise voice commands, although these are preset ones. Questions like "what's the weather" etc. For the answers it would store data that had been scraped and parsed from sites and then stored in preset fields. It's ok I guess, but not as sexy as having it simply wen search and read back the answer for anything.

Any ideas?

Cheers,

J


ARC Pro

Upgrade to ARC Pro

Unleash your robot's full potential with the cutting-edge features and intuitive programming offered by Synthiam ARC Pro.

#1  

It's an interesting concept. I'm not sure if the V4 would have enough power to web browser though. If you could find a simple page with say 100 greetings, and copied them to a txt file with each one numbered, then have ARC open and read one of the lines. That's as much as I can think of.

EDIT: I just found the FileReadLineRandom( filename ) control. no need to umber the lines anymore.

United Kingdom
#2  

You can already retrieve data from any URL with the HTTPGet function.

i.e.

$temp = HTTPGet("http://192.168.0.100/temp.cgi")

You can also get RSS Feeds, there are a lot of examples around the place including in my cloud files.

Personally I use some other programs to get, parse and store internet scraped data, then use them to send the simple data to ARC since I've not yet found an easier way of scraping and parsing a websites data in ARC.

#3  

EDITNever mind... saw the error of my ways... When I use... FileReadLineRandom("c:\temp\mylog.txt") in a script I get an "Unknown Command" error.... Does FileReadLineRandom("c:\temp\mylog.txt") work for anyone else?

United Kingdom
#5  

Hi guys,

I wasn't as much thinking about the V4 handling everything so much as the pc that is running the ARC software that is on the same wifi network. To be honest, until I get my hands on the V4 I don't really understand how it interacts with the network or how much processing is done onboard the robot vs on the host pc.

At a very high level I was thinking, V4 sending the data to the host PC and then the pc doing the interaction with the Siri type software - the output / response then being read back over the V4 speaker.

J

United Kingdom
#6  

Yes that is possible:)

There are a few ways. Voice recognition in ARC or scripts to wait for specified phrases to be spoken, httpget to scrape the information from the internet, scripts to speak it through the V4 speaker.

Not to put ARC's capabilities down at all but I find the speech recognition features in it aren't as good as other software SR. Most likely due to "other software" being specifically for SR so a lot more development time has been given to it than DJ has to give to ARC's SR.

I always recommend using a little app called VoxCommando for SR (however it isn't free but does have a trial mode and isn't too expensive), it has the ability to speak too however, until I get a V4 I can't tell you if it can directly communicate with the V4. If it can't then VoxCommando can communicate with ARC a number of ways, TELNET is likely the simplest, a simple script in VoxCommando to TELNET in to ARC with the SayWait command and the returned data from the interent. Once I have all of this figured out I will post a detailed tutorial but we have to wait for the V4 to ship before I can even start.

While not ARC it's controlling/communicating with in this example it can do... but this is Jarvis getting weather info from the internet and speaking it.

Or here is Jarvis responding dynamically based on the weather when I tell him I'm off out.

The voice software (VoxCommando) is running in the background at all times and controlling the foreground to suit (when necessary).