Halloween Robot Using AIML with Voice Recognition and Synthesis

10/6/2001
My husband and I always throw a big halloween party. This year the theme is "digital / borg" just because I wanted to show off my wearable computer. Our friend John (GetSPFX.com) typically helps us set up for the party.

While John was shopping around, he found some inexpensive ($19) talking skeletons. He picked up several for himself and several for Kai and myself. We immediately started playing with them to see what we could get out of them.

John and Kai came up with some great ideas like having 2 skeletons do the Bob and Doug Mckenzie routine (hillarious!). Well, that inspired me to try some skeleton AI ... A talking, interacting "Skeletor-bot" based on ALICE bot.

I've been playing around with Alicebot and have her set up on my local server. She has learned a decent amount from me so far, and is pretty good at interacting with people. I thought, why not add speech input and output so that ALICE passes her output to the skeleton. When the halloween guests arrive, they can talk to the Skeletor-bot and his mouth would move and eyes would light up when the ALICE program responded.

Skeletor-bot was pretty trivial to setup, and he is functioning rather well. I have a long way to go with the speech input since my skeletor-bot recognizes only "hi/hello" and "bye/goodbye/later" thus far, but I'll be working dilligently over the next couple of weeks to input other grammars relating to the guests. Skeletor-bot responds beautifully, and even sings!

I'm thinking of changing his looks prior to halloween, but we'll see if I have the time. I'd also like to hook two up together so that they can talk to each other.Later I'd like to play around with group interaction of the Sketor-bots so that a group of them can sit around and chat with each other.

Eventually, I would like to get a SBC hooked right up inside of him with a microphone attached directly to him with the ALICE bot interface driving it all. That part at least appears easily achievable. I'll have to start looking into other robot bodies that can move around. I'd love to have "Rosie the Robot" live with me. :)

10/8/2001
Skeletor-bot understands more words and phrases now. I have decided to pull my grammars from the aiml that already exists for ALICE bot - I don't know why this wasn't obvious to me a couple days ago.
There is a new movie of my husband Kai talking with skeletor bot ... funny stuff.

10/14/2001
Thanks to fellow wear-hard list member Raven (eli) for providing me with the androidworld.com link. I was looking at what else is out there and found this:

"Kokaro, a subsidiary of Sanrio of Japan has produced a talking humanoid robot which they call S-Doll. It can understand speech and conduct a conversation with a human. It will sell for 50 - 100 million yen. "

Here are some random thoughts:
Hmm ... reminds me a little of skeletor-bot. I think the "brains" are the tough part, and skeletor-bot already has a pretty good one. The body can be created or purchased. Granted, creating a body isn't a trivial matter, but Kokaro didn't even use its own body, but instead purchased it. Skeletor-bot may be more valuable than I imagined. He can certainly hold a decent conversation and can "learn" as well (I'm working on improving the learning ability so it's as close to autonomous as possible). All I would have to do would be to hook up custom gesture tags to the speech output tags, and have the computer translate the tags to movements. Am I missing something here? I noticed that the s-doll software and hardware would be sold seperately (at 5 to 10 million Yen each). It also provides visual recognition (I'm playing with this now too) ... this is not an impossible task especially with developer kits available from the visual recognition companies. Interesting. This seems too easy. Please email me if you think I'm overlooking something.
This also gives me another idea ... what about combining the robot idea with the computer textiles idea (haven't written about this one yet, but its something on my todo list) to create a robot with sensory input "skin"? Might one, for example, layer electrically conductive textiles (with layers of tulle in between) to respond to different dimensions of "touch"?

See MPG movies below: (note that sound quality is degraded because of the video camera - sounds great live)
Skeletor-bot Sings (1.24 MB)
Mel interacting with Skeletor-bot using voice input (471 KB)
This one shows the computer monitor interface along with Skeletor-bot. Skeletor-bot is driven by the ALICE bot server on my local machine. I have a plain image with textbox interface, a Microsoft Agent interface, and Skeletor-bot all at the same time. (119 KB)
This one shows 2 skeletor-bots trying to chat. One is using ALICE and the other is using a Microsoft sample called "Peedy's Pizza Palace" with a little help from me. :) (1.24 MB)
Kai and Skeletor-bot have an interesting conversation. I think this is a riot. (847 KB)

For info on ALICE bot see http://www.alicebot.org