Thursday, February 12, 2015

Can you hear me now - Part II

Part II of who knows how many. As with all things in life, the proof is in the pudding. You can have all the logic in place yet it is the constant real time testing which will determine what works best.
Let me start off saying that it is utterly amazing what you can do with a bunch of gizmos rigged up to talk to each other, still, after more than 30 years - amazing!!!
So, Achelois (pronounced Ach-e-lo-is; GreekἈχελωίς, English translation: "she who washes away pain", a minor Greek moon goddess) is responding well to most of the day to day questions, as well as minor deviations from the asked sentences. The performance is somewhat better than I expected considering that this scenario takes place in the nebulous cloud, the internet. A minor delay from the time you ask something to the time the system responds. At first I thought is was funny that when I ask something, the system responses but listens at the same time and eventually answers back to what it just said. Now, not so much. It is a constant adjustment between the microphone input and the volume of the speakers, that is why it is called fine tuning I suppose. I'm not sure where some of the connections with the words are, for example, how does a phrase like "shall we?" trigger "my name is"? Even phonetically it is not even close. 
Overall I'm pleased with the announcements of all the scheduled items, they are not intrusive and in the background. Still working on the recognition of variants for either slurred or slag questions. Here is an example on what the program interprets to the question "watcha doin": 'watcha doin',  'whatcha doin', 'whatcha doing', 'what to do in', 'what you doing', 'what you're doing'. I suppose all would be well if we all would be communicating in "proper" English without the accent, but that is not in the cards. A test revealed that there is no problem whatsoever having two computers talking to each other since the communication and pronunciation is clear, scripted and precise.
My thoughts, my update, back to work.

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