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Stephanie, open-source virtual assistant built to control and automate tasks
- Dunedan 9y agoThe website is a way better source than the Github repo: https://slapbot.github.io/ https://slapbot.github.io/
- acidburnNSA 9y agoIt looks great. Started watching the pitch video...somebody get that guy a decent microphone!!
- markatkinson 9y agoI came here to 2nd this!
- dang 9y agoOK, we changed to that from https://github.com/slapbot/stephanie-va https://github.com/slapbot/stephanie-va.
- Pfhreak 9y agoSomeday, someone will buck the trend of naming their voice assistant with a woman's name. Sadly, today is not that day.
- namlem 9y agoI'm more bothered by the fact that the name is three syllables. Ain't nobody got time for that.
- d2p 9y agoMaybe deliberate to reduce false activations? Even with three, our Echo Dot triggers many times per day when nobody is talking to "her"!
- ihuman 9y agoWhat's wrong with the trend?
- Pfhreak 9y agoThe use of (nearly exclusively?) women's names and voices for servant roles? It continues a stereotype that I believe is problematic.
- sekhat 9y agoA woman's voice is not used due to it being a "servent". A woman's voice is used, because testing has shown both men and women respond positively to women's voices, while the same is not true of men's voices. Of course, along with a women's voice, it makes sense to go along with a woman's name.
- haldean 9y agoIt can have a female voice without it having a woman's name; the "Google Assistant" is a good example. It's extremely off-putting that the only software we give human names to is the software we boss around, and when we do give it a name, the name is always female.
- Medaber 9y agoYawn. Stop trying these make this another Donglegate.
- nathanasmith 9y ago> It's extremely off-putting that the only software we give human names to is the software we boss around, and when we do give it a name, the name is always female. That's not true though. Just a cursory glance at the Play Store with the search term "voice assistant"[0] reveals mostly gender neutral with some male and female. I "equalled" the female names and plussed the male names: Dragon Mobile Assistant; =Cortana – Digital assistant; Indigo Virtual Assistant; Smart Voice Assistant; OK Google; =Robin - AI Voice Assistant; DataBot Assistant; =EVA Free - Voice Assistant; utter! Voice Commands BETA!; voice Assistant; +Jarvis - My Personal Assistant; Google Allo; Extreme: Personal Assistant; =AIVC (Alice); HOUND Voice Search & Assistant; Google Now Launcher; Genie; =Amazon Alexa; My Assistant; Heaveen; +SpeakBro; +ANDY Voice Assistant (FREE); Cyman Mark 2 Free; +Noah Voice Assistant Beta; My Android Assistant; AVX Free - Voice Assistant; Moto Voice; +EVAN Free - Voice Assistant; Voice Assistant; Get Assistant - Root Tally: 5 female and 5 male with 20 gender neutral including some arguable, e.g., "Cyman" (Simon?) and Robin. This isn't the most scientific thing but it certainly exposes the assertion "the name is always female" for what it is. The really unfortunate thing is this erroneous belief is so ingrained that half the comments here are bike shedding about this exact point instead of discussing how cool this piece of software is. Not that I'm helping that problem. [0]https://play.google.com/store/apps/collection/search_results_cluster_apps?clp=ggERCg92b2ljZSBhc3Npc3RhbnQ%3D%3AS%3AANO1ljJOnq8&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/collection/search_results...
- nerdponx 9y agoTo be fair, Siri is androgynous enough and could be given a man's voice by default.
- peteretep 9y agoI gave Siri a male voice right out of the bag, and keep forgetting other people have female Siris. Having Butler Siri feels classy...
- lucaspiller 9y agoIn the UK, Siri has a male voice by default.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- rexpop 9y agoelliot.ai
- nathanasmith 9y agoLet me rephrase my suggestion for what to do here. Seems in the config.ini file, there is a setting for what you want the assistant's name to be: [SYSTEM] assistant_name = Stephanie welcome_message = How may I help you? wake_up_engine = False wake_up_command = Stephanie wake up I would presume you just replace Stephanie with whatever you want.
- lintroller 9y agoPersonification of the assistant allows a more intimate experience for those not of the computer science inclination. Humans know how to talk to other humans, most are still too unfamiliar with speaking only to "a computer program at a data center somewhere" to get any real use out of it. Anecdotal, but I have an aunt who hates computers but loves the Echo because of Alexa. By giving the assistant a name and speaking to it conversationally, she was able to "trust" it much faster than many other technologies.
- nathanasmith 9y ago>Personification of the assistant allows a more intimate experience for those not of the computer science inclination. Fair enough. Yeah, I'm pretty sure I don't want anything I do with my phone to be described as an "intimate experience". Takes all kinds.
- bruxis 9y agoYeah, I really don't want a voice assistant with the name of an ex.
- PleaseHelpMe 9y agoSeriously? Then you should try Google since I believe no girl has OK GOOGLE name
- tachyonbeam 9y agoBut imagine the people who had the Google voice actress as an ex :O Dating profile: I know this is a bit odd, but I can only date you if you're an iPhone user.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- SwellJoe 9y agoI dated the woman who did the voice for Google Voice (the voicemail service). She moved out to CA with me when my company got accepted to YC and she got a job at Google. I dunno exactly how she ended up doing the voice for it, but it's always been vaguely surreal to hear her answering my phone (I use Google Voice, and last I listened she was still the voice ~9 years later). It's not that big of a deal, more of a weird anecdote (that I've very rarely had occasion to tell before now) than anything traumatic. Seems like a personal assistant voice would be kinda the same. Though maybe you hear it more often. But, it's probably not something that happens very often. I mean, how many personal assistant voices are there, and how many people can they have dated?
- eloisant 9y agoDon't personal assistant use voice synthesis rather than voice acting?
- amelius 9y agoAlso, don't use a common male/female name for a voice assistant the same way you don't use a common name for a dog. You don't want to be calling your assistant or pet and some nearby person looks up. PS: If you have a grudge against your neighbor, you could use their first name for your dog >:)
- gooseus 9y agoI agree, in fact, I think our AI deserve far less regard than pets or even our least favorite being (spiders and molds and such). I want to call my voice assistant robot "Assistant" or just say "Computer", like in Star Trek.
- _jtrig 9y agoThis is exactly the kind of IoT I was hoping for. Not the bastardized corporate data-mining kind. Hope this project keeps growing!
- whyagaindavid 9y agoIt uses speech to text from Google/MS/Facebook/IBM/SoundCloud with your API key https://slapbot.github.io/documentation/configuration/ https://slapbot.github.io/documentation/configuration/
- crawfordcomeaux 9y agoI wonder how easy it'd be to add support for Sphinx via Python's SpeechRecognition package...
- Eridrus 9y agoHas anyone in this thread actually used this or looked at the code? This outsources speech recognition, and then the natural language understanding is literally just keyword matching: https://github.com/SlapBot/stephanie-va/blob/master/modules.json https://github.com/SlapBot/stephanie-va/blob/master/modules.... This is about as technically interesting as the Jarvis this takes inspiration from.
- _jtrig 9y agoThere's nothing stopping you from using your own speech recognition software once someone makes an open-source platform/database for it. It's a step in the right direction.
- notgood 9y agoHow many times have you complained about 99% of soldiers being male? Let me guess, none. Or 75% of suicides being males? Let me guess, none too. Now, how many times you have complained about the gender of artificial computer voices like you just did? many times right? Not only you give this kind of inane issues any relevance whatsoever, you give none to any actual form of equality and pretend us to take it seriously.
- backpropaganda 9y agoWhoa slow down there fella, or you're going to run out of red pills.
- notgood 9y agoI not once have entered that subreddit; my opinions were formed completely by myself; shocking I know.
- crawfordcomeaux 9y agoNone of that is relevant to their point. Would you mind sticking to the topic instead of trying to dismiss them based off your assumptions about them? Unless you know them personally, you likely know nothing about who you're responding to. Maybe take a deep breath and evaluate whether you're here to seek a broader sense of the truth or just want to be right about whatever your cause is?
- qb45 9y agoThis comment was indeed convoluted, but I wonder if your last sentence wouldn't apply equally well to the top voted comment in this submission and those who upvoted it?
- crawfordcomeaux 9y agoProbably. Most people fighting the gender wars need to sit down, stop talking, and start listening to the other side. MRAs/feminists are people who are in pain and each one's specific pain needs to be heard. I'm not referring to their grievances toward their gender...that's a separate ordeal. Before we can talk about those things productively, the pain bringing them to the table needs to be empathized with by whoever sits opposite them.
- Animats 9y agoNice. Anyone interested in porting this to Android to replace Google voice-driven services? F-Droid needs this.
- nathanasmith 9y agoThe whole thing is written in Python so it shouldn't be that hard. Maybe use something like QPython[0] It might Just Work. [0]http://qpython.com/ http://qpython.com/
- whyagaindavid 9y agohttps://slapbot.github.io/documentation/configuration/ https://slapbot.github.io/documentation/configuration/ Sadly not possible with fdroid if it has api keys from proprietary services.
- Animats 9y agoOh, I though it did speech to text itself. It just calls one of several commercial speech to text engines run by Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. Could CMUSphinx be used? That's open source speech recognition that can fit in a phone if you keep the vocabulary size down.
- theprop 9y agoCool! Any video demo or anything of this anywhere?
- PleaseHelpMe 9y agoThis may be helpful to you : https://youtu.be/Pp5dXbWZsrU?t=1m40s https://youtu.be/Pp5dXbWZsrU?t=1m40s
- microcolonel 9y agoThere are lots of projects like this today; but I think the most important and useful thing (profoundly missing) is an open source state-of-art offline (or maybe hybrid) speech recognition package. Until that happens, almost nothing has changed.
- nathanasmith 9y agoFor anyone else on Linux that gets the error: Default Audio Player for mp3 files is not set up, like vlc or something. when you try to run it, note that Stephanie depends on the python module os.startfile[0] which apparently is a Windows only thing that works like xdg-open. I'm not a python expert but here's what I did: the offending file is stephanie-va-master/Stephanie/TextManager/speaker.py. If you edit line 15 which is: os.startfile(self.speak_result) and change it to: os.system("xdg-open " + self.speak_result) everything works. Somebody else more knowledgeable can probably suggest something better. [0]https://docs.python.org/3.6/library/os.html#os.startfile https://docs.python.org/3.6/library/os.html#os.startfile Edit: Fixed! They fixed it by wrapping that line in an if statement checking the output of sys.platform. Very responsive dev.
- GordonS 9y ago> or just write your own modules to extend the functionality of the application using simple as f* guide. I'm not one to be a prude... but, is this really necessary?
- partycoder 9y agoI would recommend re-recording the video with a better audio setup, including a good mic or try to process the audio somehow. It's a bit difficult to hear.
- kevintb 9y agoI'm sure this is a great project, but for once, it would be wonderful if Virtual Assistants weren't named after women.
- nathanasmith 9y agoWe've already hashed this out in these very comments. If you'd read before posting, you'd see the premise was investigated by looking at the current crop of virtual assistants on the play store and found to be false.
- mort96 9y agoFirstly, there's no requirement to read other unrelated threads before commenting in this thread. Secondly, what's more relevant: Siri, Cortana, and Alexa, or random assistants on the Play store? (I'm ignoring Google Assistant, as that's named after a company, not a male or female). To be clear, I don't think it matters whether assistants are named after males or females, I just thought your comment was needlessly dismissive. Had you provided a link to the other hacker news thread[s] and not been as aggressive, your comment would have had much more value.
- nathanasmith 9y ago>Firstly, there's no requirement to read other unrelated threads before commenting in this thread. The guy started a new thread on the exact same issue that had already been discussed completely with insightful posts on both sides in another thread containing exactly 32 comments which was more than half the total comments on the article at the time he posted. Starting a new thread when over 50 percent of the comments were on this exact subject was absolutely unnecessary and frankly tiresome. And you claim that is "unrelated". How exactly do you get that? >Secondly, what's more relevant: Siri, Cortana, and Alexa, or random assistants on the Play store? The latter are more relevant as this is an assistant written by some guy by himself in Python. Furthermore, in the settings for this one, you can name it whatever you want. Additionally, note how Siri defaults to male or female depending on the market. Specifically, in the UK, it is male out of the box. >I'm ignoring Google Assistant Hmm.. >I just thought your comment was needlessly dismissive. Had you provided a link to the other hacker news thread[s] and not been as aggressive, your comment would have had much more value. Provide a link? Use your eyes. The comments are inches away on this exact page. The bottom line is, this issue was talked about thoroughly, yet it keeps being brought up, derailing the comments, instead of actually discussing the topic at hand which is the app the guy wrote. This kind of thing makes Hacker News less useful and that is a worse problem than my purported "dismissiveness" over something that shouldn't exist in the first place.
- wcummings 9y agoSlapbot?