Linuxtage 09

On Saturday we gave a presentation at this years Linuxtage in Graz.

In short: It was awesome :)

We had the largest of the three lecture halls and it was nearly full which means we had about 30 - 40 people listening. The presentation of the software worked out perfectly which just goes to show that the current version is very usable already.

Sadly we could not get into all the discussion points presented during the presentation (after all we had just 45 minutes) so we continued the discussion in the cafeteria afterwards.

All in all, it was a great way to get people interested in the project and it was a pleasure to meet and talk to other free software enthusiasts.

On a related note: One of the people I talked to at the conference, Sven Guckes, pointed me to an Austrian phonetic database called Adaba. This database also comes with a lot of sound samples spoken from professional speakers so this could even be a starting point for a speaker independant german acoustic model. However, the licence is commercial so we have to see what we can do...

Correction (11.05.2009)
Seems like I mixed up two conversations I had. Astrid Gruber was the one that pointed me to Adabe. Thank you very much!

A little fun with the AI Plugin

I just set up a little conversation model which allows for a handful of simple sentences to be recognized. I then loaded the AI Plugin, turned up the speakers and had a little conversation with my notebook :)

This is how it went:

Me: Hello
Computer: Hi there!
Me: What is your name
Computer: My name is alice.
Me: My name is Peter
Computer: Your name is Peter?
Me: Yes
Computer: That's cool.
Me: Yes
Computer: Pardon me?
Me: Yes
Computer: Ah.
Me: What are you
Computer: I am alice. The female chat robot-electronic brain...
Me: Cool
Computer: Who is the best robot?
Me: you are the best
Computer: Thank you very much human...
Me: you are welcome
Computer: The pleasure was all mine.
Me: Bye
Computer: Thanks for chatting, Peter!

While certainly not very helpful - this is pretty cool :)

A little Story about Accidents, Releases and Conferences

Ok the update schedule on this blog is getting a bit ridiculous :)

However, I have an excuse this time: About a month and a half a go I had a pretty bad accident (no cars or other persons involved). I broke both legs and am currently sitting in a wheelchair. As a result, the simon development has been a bit lower on my todo list(s) than usual. I put some explanations up on the sourceforge page and on the german ubuntu forum (actually while still in the ICU) but forgot the blog somehow. For those of you that though that the project might have been halted: I am sorry.

I am expected to learn to walk and subsequently begin to work full time again in July.

On the plus side: We still managed to release the first release candidate of simon!
It is pretty much just a packaged version of what we had already finished before my accident but it still is pretty stable and defenitely a lot better than beta 3.
There are still two issues (which are pretty bad: one crash and one bug that just stops the recognition without any visual indication) but both are related to julius and are hopefully fixed soon. Anyways, they are non-blockers - the problems only occur during restarting the recognition which doesn't happen once you set up your model.

For our readers from Austria: We are presenting the current prototype at the Grazer Linuxtage 09 in Graz. If you live near Graz: Come by and take a look - admission is free!