I've just been officially approved as a mentor for KDE. There are three ideas already for simon on the ideas page.
It's the first time I'll (hopefully) be participating in GSoC (as a mentor) but I am very much looking forward to it.
I hope to find a few students interested in simon so if you want to do anything that has to do with speech recognition at all (even if it's not mentioned in the ideas page), just contact me.
Want to voice-control your lawn mower? Talk to your Roomba? We can do that :)
Let your ideas run wild!
Samstag, 19. März 2011
CeBIT 2011
I've been to quite a few conferences in the past year including cooperate stuff like the AAL Forum in Denmark but also this years Akademy, the OpenSUSE conference and the LinuxTage in Graz (where I'll be again this year, btw.). However, I've never been to anything like the CeBIT.
We arrived a day early to inspect our booth space and to set up our equipment. I then had a quick stroll through the rest of our hall. That "quick stroll" took about an hour. And that was only "our" hall (hall 2) which isn't even the biggest one of the 17 - again: seventeen - halls in use.
But you all probably knew that the CeBIT, the biggest IT fair in the world, was quite big :). Still, it's something entirely different to walk through the halls yourself. Not that we had a lot of time to explore the exhibition - no, we were plenty busy :)
The simon booth had an ideal position in one of the most frequented halls right in the middle of the open source area. That meant we got a lot of foot traffic and had lots of interesting conversations. We also had a lot of people coming up to us telling us that they already use simon. This included stuff like home automation - a first for simon AFAIK.
We also met quite a few people how work in nursing homes that were quite impressed with simon and exchanged contact information with us. We got amazing feedback and of course a lot of feature requests so we won't be running out of ideas any time soon :)
As a little thank you to all the people behind simon we sent out invitations to simons many testers, contributers and translators including free tickets for the event. Many had to decline because they live too far away but some could make it and met us in Germany. Among them was John Ambeliotis, author of jaNET a personal assistant powered by simon.
I think it's great to meet contributers up close instead of just communicating per e-Mail and want to thank everybody again who came to visit us and expressed interest in simon!
We arrived a day early to inspect our booth space and to set up our equipment. I then had a quick stroll through the rest of our hall. That "quick stroll" took about an hour. And that was only "our" hall (hall 2) which isn't even the biggest one of the 17 - again: seventeen - halls in use.
But you all probably knew that the CeBIT, the biggest IT fair in the world, was quite big :). Still, it's something entirely different to walk through the halls yourself. Not that we had a lot of time to explore the exhibition - no, we were plenty busy :)
The simon booth had an ideal position in one of the most frequented halls right in the middle of the open source area. That meant we got a lot of foot traffic and had lots of interesting conversations. We also had a lot of people coming up to us telling us that they already use simon. This included stuff like home automation - a first for simon AFAIK.
We also met quite a few people how work in nursing homes that were quite impressed with simon and exchanged contact information with us. We got amazing feedback and of course a lot of feature requests so we won't be running out of ideas any time soon :)
As a little thank you to all the people behind simon we sent out invitations to simons many testers, contributers and translators including free tickets for the event. Many had to decline because they live too far away but some could make it and met us in Germany. Among them was John Ambeliotis, author of jaNET a personal assistant powered by simon.
 | |
| John and me next to the simon listens booth |
I think it's great to meet contributers up close instead of just communicating per e-Mail and want to thank everybody again who came to visit us and expressed interest in simon!
Samstag, 5. Februar 2011
Waking from Hibernation
After a very busy Jannuary I finally have some more time to work on simon again. Do expect more updates than usual from me this month :)
The first week(s) I will be working on getting the Akonadi integration in simon up and running. Using this new plugin you will be able to schedule simon commands on specific dates / times using your conventional groupware infrastructure.
For example, you can use simons dialog system to wake you up in the morning by scheduling an event in KOrganizer with a special (but configurable) prefix in the events summary: By default "[simon-command] Dialog/Welcome" would execute the welcome dialog at the start time of the event in your calendar.
The Akonadi plugin also provides the option to react on other, "normal" events by displaying a reminder about them - again by using the dialog system. This is meant as a replacement of the korganizer reminder system for voice controlled systems.
You can even use the Akonadi plugin to schedule command executions from within simon.
The dialog system has been spruced up and now sports support for user avatars and multiple texts per state (one will be randomly selected during execution to make the system feel a bit more natural).
Other than that I will also be working - again - on improving our speech model creation technique and have also been assigned to have a look at some problems in ssc / sscd again that seem to creep up in the windows version.
The other parts of our Benefit project are also progressing well and we will be starting the first prototyping tests within the next couple of weeks. I hope I can get some video demonstrations done before the end of the month.
Of course, next to all that serious business I couldn't resist to hack around a bit and developed a tiny proof of concept that demonstrates a novel approach on how to deal with false positives in a speech recognition system that will basically running 24 / 7.
The prototype uses opencv and the webcam of my notebook and runs a simple face detection on the current image. If no person is found sitting in front of the laptop and looking at its screen, simon is automatically disabled. As soon as the user looks at the computer again, the system is re-activated.
This is just a proof of concept at this stage but is already working quite well. I hope to extend this into a regular simon plugin that could use simons filter system to toggle recognition for simon 0.4. Yes, we are going multimodal :)
The first week(s) I will be working on getting the Akonadi integration in simon up and running. Using this new plugin you will be able to schedule simon commands on specific dates / times using your conventional groupware infrastructure.
For example, you can use simons dialog system to wake you up in the morning by scheduling an event in KOrganizer with a special (but configurable) prefix in the events summary: By default "[simon-command] Dialog/Welcome" would execute the welcome dialog at the start time of the event in your calendar.
The Akonadi plugin also provides the option to react on other, "normal" events by displaying a reminder about them - again by using the dialog system. This is meant as a replacement of the korganizer reminder system for voice controlled systems.
You can even use the Akonadi plugin to schedule command executions from within simon.
The dialog system has been spruced up and now sports support for user avatars and multiple texts per state (one will be randomly selected during execution to make the system feel a bit more natural).
Other than that I will also be working - again - on improving our speech model creation technique and have also been assigned to have a look at some problems in ssc / sscd again that seem to creep up in the windows version.
The other parts of our Benefit project are also progressing well and we will be starting the first prototyping tests within the next couple of weeks. I hope I can get some video demonstrations done before the end of the month.
Of course, next to all that serious business I couldn't resist to hack around a bit and developed a tiny proof of concept that demonstrates a novel approach on how to deal with false positives in a speech recognition system that will basically running 24 / 7.
The prototype uses opencv and the webcam of my notebook and runs a simple face detection on the current image. If no person is found sitting in front of the laptop and looking at its screen, simon is automatically disabled. As soon as the user looks at the computer again, the system is re-activated.
This is just a proof of concept at this stage but is already working quite well. I hope to extend this into a regular simon plugin that could use simons filter system to toggle recognition for simon 0.4. Yes, we are going multimodal :)
Dienstag, 21. Dezember 2010
simon at the CeBIT OpenSource 2011
Thanks to the generous support of the Linux New Media AG, the simon listens e.V. will have a stand at this years CeBIT OpenSource event.
The CeBIT is the biggest IT event worldwide with more than 400 thousand visitors last year so you can image that I'm pretty excited about this :)
I'm definitely looking forward to seeing some KDE folk there as well!
On a related note: Does anyone know a cheap place to stay at during the event? It seems like the superlatives of the event sadly extend to the hotel rates during the exhibition...
Mittwoch, 8. Dezember 2010
Robotics: Research Laboratories Tour
A couple of days ago, we received a rather intriguing mail: Our project partner on the current ECHORD EU-Project told us that they would, in the process of getting an overview of current developments, undertake a tour through the most promising robotics research laboratories in America and Asia.
Now, I'm not exactly an expert when it comes to robotics but maybe you are?
Maybe you know a really great lab that works on cutting edge technologies related to robotics (especially human / robot interaction)? Maybe you even work at one?
If so, please post in the comment section or simply drop us a line at office (ate) simon-listens.org. Thanks!
Now, I'm not exactly an expert when it comes to robotics but maybe you are?
Maybe you know a really great lab that works on cutting edge technologies related to robotics (especially human / robot interaction)? Maybe you even work at one?
If so, please post in the comment section or simply drop us a line at office (ate) simon-listens.org. Thanks!
Donnerstag, 25. November 2010
CeBIT Open Source 2011
Just a tiny update: This years CeBIT again contains a special section called "CeBIT Open Source". This dedicated section contains funded exhibition stands for selected open source projects.
I have just sent out the application form for a simon stand at the CeBIT 2011 :)
Whish us luck!
Dienstag, 23. November 2010
Integrating speech recognition with other applications
As many of you will probably already know, we pay a lot of attention to make speech recognition actually usable by integrating it with existing applications. We do this by simulating conventional interaction patterns (mainly mouse and keyboard) through our command infrastructure.
simon 0.4, however, will also allow application developers to use the speech recognition much more effectively by providing plugins to call DBus and JSON functions.
If the application to be controlled has either of those interfaces, you can utilize these new command plugins to write simon scenarios that call methods in the application through the IPC layer. This way you can directly execute code with voice commands which makes the system much more robust and powerful than, for example, using global shortcuts for the same purpose.
Moreover, simon 0.4 provides a dbus interface to allow third party applications to execute simon commands directly as well.
simon 0.4, however, will also allow application developers to use the speech recognition much more effectively by providing plugins to call DBus and JSON functions.
If the application to be controlled has either of those interfaces, you can utilize these new command plugins to write simon scenarios that call methods in the application through the IPC layer. This way you can directly execute code with voice commands which makes the system much more robust and powerful than, for example, using global shortcuts for the same purpose.
Moreover, simon 0.4 provides a dbus interface to allow third party applications to execute simon commands directly as well.
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