The talking (and listening) Gecko

Its been quite a while since I last blogged about the project status, and now a good summer of coding has come to an end (according to the program timeline). I should thank Mr. Stephen Shaw "decriptor" (for being a "kewl" mentor, Mr. Pascal Bleser "yaloki" for mavenizing the code, among other things and Mr. Bryen Yunashko "suseROCKS" for getting my project selected and finding a mentor for me. (It was fun to have three openSUSE board members involved in the project)

I would like to report my works done till the "firm" pen (or pencil) down date - 17/08/2009. The code and other things can be accessed at http://code.google.com/p/vaani

As mentioned in the proposal, the softwar consists primarily of two parts-

*Part 1: The text NLP part - which analyzes text inputs and tries to find common desktop activities that the user might be trying to convey through it.

*Part 2: The speech analyzer part - which converts an audio input to text, and lets the first part complete the rest of the process.

Part 1 (mostly present in vaani.shabd package) is fairly complete, currently it has the following plugins -

1. Instant message plugin - analyzes purple buddy list information, and uses dbus to open new chat windows in Pidgin (an Empathy plugin can be extended easily).

2. Application plugin - which right now collects information from the .Desktop files, and tries to find the required application based on the text.

3. Search plugin - this performs searches using the beagle-query command (to be upgraded to use beagle-dbus soon).

The framework is fairly clean, and new plugins can be added easily.

About the 2nd part (vaani.swar package), the approach was to have a grammar for each plugin, and then the Recognizer would use all of these grammars to convert speech commands to text. Right now, grammars for the instant message and application plugin are ready, however the 2nd part isn't functional yet, owing to some problems with grammar compilation by the sphinx system. Effort is currently been put into making it work asap.

The 0.1 release can be downloaded from here, although checking out from svn would be a better option. Also, we need to package the code soon, currently the best way to hack it is by opening the project in an IDE (I wrote in Netbeans) Please try, suggestions/contributions/criticism are always welcome.