Exercise 34: AppointmentsNovember 6, 2008
Summary  | "My next dentist appointment is on November 6th at 3:45" or "I have a dentist appointment on {date} at {time}" or "I have an appointment with {person} on {date} at {time}". Appointments to support: Dentist, massage, doctor, church, and work. Also support non-specific appointments such as "I have an appointment on {date} at {time}". |
| When an appointment is created, add it to the individual's Google Calendar. |
| "What appointments do I have today?" should result in "You have a dentist appointment at {time}". |
| "What appointments do I have this week?" should result in "You have a dentist appointment on Thursday at 3:45, a massage appointment on Friday at 7:00, and a church appointment on Saturday at 8:00". |
| For the time being, implement a speaker specification via the command "This is {person} speaking". So, for example. "Grace, this is Daniel speaking. I have dentist appointment on November 6th at 3:45". To make this work it will be necessary to implement a secondary command and control grammar that doesn't require the "Grace" prefix. This grammar should be enabled for three seconds after a previous command is interpreted, at which point the standard command and control grammar should be reverted to. |
SolutionClick hereCommentsThis one ended up being a very involved effort -- not a few days, or even a week, but several weeks. I needed to overhaul the linguistic transformation algorithm for performance reasons, which I did as exercises 39 and 40, and there were several other significant changes that needed to be made. Finishing this exercise has culminated in having a working installation of the application in our Kitchen here at home, running on an iMac. I will use the ability to create and query appointments as a test case over the next few months to see how the technology feels to use.
One Voice TechnologiesNovember 6, 2008
I followed a link from the Voice Tracker Array Microphone to
One Voice Technologies, which is a company that is actively pursuing the home automation sector. Reading their website, it sounds like they understand the big picture pretty well and have some primitive but working products. Very cool!
Voice Tracker Array MicrophoneNovember 6, 2008
While I was doing some Google searches the other day, I came across a link to a developer who had put together a from-scratch voice recognition application for his pocket PC. I seem to be impressed by the spirit of curiosity in people that drives them to figures out how complicated things work, and so I sent him an email to tell him that I liked his project. I also mentioned in the email that I was interested in the field of voice recognition and specifically home automation. His response surprised me: He had just started working on the very same project!
He sent me a link to the
Voice Tracker Array Microphone and it has been very eye opening. It's great to see an example of a company working on the very technology that I was reading about in a paper a couple of weeks ago. Perhaps this microphone would be capable of implementing far-field command and control ASR in a kitchen environment?
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