daniel bigham.ca

A significant day
January 11, 2009

Today was a significant day for me: I finished work on the first phase of my "Grace" project, which concludes about 7 months and 250 hours of work. The application is up and running in the kitchen, powered by a 20" iMac, a Voice Tracker array microphone, and a lot of elbow grease!

I opened up our calendar and spoke each of our January appointments to the application, followed by a few spoken queries, and things appear to be working quite well. Meredith came downstairs for me to show it off, and we had some good laughs as we often do. If it wasn't for Meredith's idea to get an iMac, we'd have a 2" hole drilled in our kitchen counter right now!

Working on this project has been a phenomenal opportunity for me personally. There is something magical about using your imagination, letting your mind dream, and then with hard work turning that vision into reality.

Along those lines, one of the over arching themes of this project has been to use my own imagination rather than researching and adapting what others have done, and I think that is the aspect of the project that I enjoyed the most. Surely research is important, and the way things are usually done, but I wonder whether progress is sometimes limited by the approach of always adapting the work of others. For me, it is wonderfully freeing to blow the doors wide open and simply dive in with as much imagination as possible.

So with that, I express my thankfulness to our Heavenly Creator for a wonderful opportunity, when life is sweet and appreciated dearly.

Microsoft speaker identification
January 5, 2009

Something that I'd like to add to the Grace application is speaker identification. There are two benefits:

1.	If you can identify the speaker, you can switch to their recognition profile which improves the accuracy.

2.	The speaker can use words like "I" and "me". ex. "I have an appointment tomorrow at 3:00 PM".

Until I get something like this working, it would be impossible for Meredith to make use of a kitchen setup, since the recognition accuracy for her voice against my recognition profile would be unusable.

I came upon an interesting page at Microsoft today: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/whisperid/default.aspx. It's neat to see that they're working on some of the same things.

The next six months
December 25, 2008

After working on this project for 6-7 months, we've arrived at Christmas '08, and it is nearly time to direct energies elsewhere:

Because I've spent so much time working on this project, I've been procrastinating on my goal of reading the Bible in a year, so I will need to devote 5-6 hours a week on that until June.

With the hope of biking across Canada this summer, I need to start getting back into shape, and there is lots of planning to be done.

Littlehamberg is set to arrive late March / early April!

Work for Wilf on various web sites.

Hopefully gone all summer biking across the country!

With all of these things on the horizon, I don't expect to be spending more than a couple of hours a week on the Plato/Grace projects. Before I completely change gears, I would like to get the following up and running:

The plan is to take one of my two LCDs and set it up in the corner of our kitchen with the Voice Tracker array microphone in front and below it. This will require purchasing a used computer (hopefully for cheap) off of Kajiji and putting it below the kitchen counter. Connecting the monitor/mic to the computer will unfortunately involve drilling a 2" hole through the kitchen counter.

Grace will require some changes to reduce the number of false positives: That is, when she responds to a perceived command that is just two people talking in the background. To help prevent this, I'm going to change the grammar to have "Grace" be a command that must be recognized on its own before the speaker can speak the command. Currently the word "Grace" can simply be spoken as the first word of a sentence, and I expect that plays into the number of false/positives. I'll also need to add a "Confirm/Cancel" mechanism to certain commands to give additional control and further reduce undesired actions such as spontaneously playing songs.

I need to finish up exercise 34, which allows appointments to be added. This will serve as the base use case of the system, allowing me to add events and ask queries such as "What appointments do I have this week?" or "What is my next appointment?". I will use this over the next number of months as a test bed for the technology.

4.	Program state needs to be saved on a regular basis and whenever the program closes.

Some basic power management needs to be added so that the computer monitor is turned off soon after a command/question has been answered. This will save energy and make the system more elegant. (Who wants an LCD monitor shining from the corner of the room all the time?) Power management to put the computer into hibernation mode also needs to be added so that when we leave for work and at bed time, the system will automatically turn off to save energy.

6.	An interface needs to be added to the outside world so that, via the web, commands can be given and queries answered from any computer or handheld device. I'll also add a command line utility to my Linux environment at work so that I can type something such as:

grace "I have a work appointment tomorrow at 9:30 am"

7.	I would like to create a simple, concise web site to present the ideas I've cultivated while working on this project. This will likely be a work in progress over the next few months.

And with that, it will be time to wrap things up until next fall at the earliest!

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