I'm 80 years old. I want to bu

Hi PCDoc, I'd like to do the same thing..

Frank

There are amazing new chat bot that is part of Alexa. There is a prize going on between universities to come up with the best chatbot and you never know which one you have active as they randomize them, but last night my wife spent 35 minutes talking with Alexa on one of these chatbots and...it was simply amazing. On this particular one it accessed information from the internet as we asked questions and she asked us questions. It felt like a real conversation. My mother is 77 and she loves my robot Alena and now I feel like I could put my robot with this chatbot in her room to have someone to converse with.

I think this really could give everyone an option for companionship.

I have Alexa,and I wanted to try out Alexa Chat bot, guess what this service is not available in Canada, This  :pinch:

Oh no! Really? That's not fair. Not sure why they choose to do something like that..it seems more data from all over the world would be a better choice for making AI smarter....

I have alexa as well and didn't know there was a chatbot. I guess since I'm in canada that's why :D

We'll have to make a skill subscription system someday for alexa. "Alexa, tell my robot to come to the kitchen"

That'd be cool

That would be cool. Here are this years winners from calstate Davis. Their chatbot is amazing. She mostly controls the conversation by asking alot of questions to you. A different feel than the standard ones. I'll try and get a video of Alena as Alexa having a conversation with me tomorrow and posta few minutes of it. You will see a difference right away.

https://developer.amazon.com/alexaprize

I just found out today that you can download Alexa to your PC. Not sure if this is just a USA thing or global, but I really like having Alexa instead or Cortana. I have 5 Alexa's in my house so its nice to have them all connected through the same account for reminders and lists (PC too)

This a bit lengthy video (5 min 30 sec) because it ended up being a much longer conversation. But you can see the difference in engagement. There are several bots and this one i have spoken two on several occasions as she remembers me, they are the second runner up...there is no way to choose which one you speak to. So today we get this one.

Sorry for the buzzing/humming..my florescent lights ballast is about to go out at my station.

This is amazing. Thanks Will. I need to figure out how to get Alexa downloaded to my laptop and channel it through my B9 like you did with Alena. He won't sound like my old friend but it would be cool to have this interaction with B9 like I can do with alexa. The neon flash would sync up nicely with the alexa voice.

This demonstration was the Alexa echo dot (hockey puck) and i used the new blue tooth speaker system i built into Alena  and Alan to connect her. Alexa connected to the speakers and away we went.

You can easily use the PC version to do this, except you have to push the icon on the screen to activate the mic every time you talk to her ...no wake word like "hey alexa". But once the social bot starts on alexa (on the PC version) you don't have to hit the icon continuously and its mostly automatic from there. You could also connect via bluetooth from the computer to the robot. I bought a cheap module on amazon and added an amp..works great.

Thanks Will for the explanation. I've got Alexa working on the PC just fine now. Much better the the other old lady. I have used the chatbots in Alexa that are being developed by different people. Some are great and some are weak. You did say above that Calstate Davis was amazing. However if you come across one in particular in the future that you recommend I would love to hear about it. I'm sure we all would. You do such great research on this kind of thing.

Ya, I kinda thought I'd need a seperate bluetooth receiver on the robot to get the Alexa response from the pc. But if your not running through ARC how did you get the servos to match the speech in the jaw? You probably have it documented in your project showcase. If so just say so and I'll dig it up if I can find it in this new forum format. ;)

EDIT: Wow we can edit comments now! Nice. Things are coming along on this new forum nicely!  I see on a post above from you Will that the bots cant be chosen. You get what you get. I need to look into this more to understand it I guess. Must be a contest. I was playing around with Alexa a few weeks back and thought I was able to pick from a list available. :unsure:

Yes the two strong ones are Cal state davis and the one from above who were from Prague, who were the runner ups to the Alexa prize. The others are not good.

I use a seperate drop in card for the jaw sync for both robots. There are several on the market, I use Audio Control Board and the Scary Terry board, both do exactly the same thing. They convert the audio into PWM for the servo and there are several onboard pots to dial in the sound and the jaw movement. I did this so i can pump lots of different types of audio thru the robots.

Nice! That makes sense now. I had also had multiple ways to input sound into my B9 years ago. However I stripped a couple of the devices (Bluetooth receiver and an automatic A/B switch) to simplify things. Looks like it's working for you nicely though.

I've heard those Scary Terry board work great. I've always wondered if they could be adapted to work with the neon flash in a B9 but I'm not smart enough to figure that one out. LOL.