Community collaboration.

[scott_fx]

I've been testing out the feasibility of using voxcommando in my car and; while doing this, have been watching a lot of the you tube videos. Recently I watched the human touch vids and it got me thinking.  I like this exploration of the program. But at the end of the day it's just spitting out what you programmed it to say/do.   I think it would be great to have a repository of user submitted commands.  A community built resource or plugin that vc can randomly choose from when replying to you.  This could open up the software greatly and help give voxcommando more of a personality if you will.  The more contributions the more dynamic vc will be

Just a thought.

[nime5ter]

It's an interesting idea.

One question is: will people really contribute, and with what range of quality? In how many languages? (We have a pretty international crowd.)

Another is, what kind of material are you looking for? Actual dialogue with the computer will get complicated quickly.

A few years ago, James set up a VC Pandorabot with the idea that users would train it, but there wasn't enough participation to effectively train it. I think using open dictation also caused some issues, and just the quality of the Pandorabot exchange meant it got old quickly, basically.

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That said, for now, if it's of interest, we could build up a community jokes data set and maybe a trivia data set.

These wouldn't allow for "meaningful dialogue" with the computer, but you could ask for a joke and get stuff you haven't heard before.

As a test, I've created a Google spreadsheet with 2 sheets: 1 sheet is for jokes, 1 sheet is for trivia/factoids. It's editable, so you can add your own content: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17ZzU9I9lUCv-dlNh475a5RgeMskSFWo6laKrN-yt86Q/edit?usp=sharing

Then, you can either (a) download each spreadsheet as a CSV file and read random responses from those, or (b) scrape the spreadsheet online to get a random response that way.

a) Is faster/more efficient, but it means you'd have to periodically download the files again to update your content
b) Is more cludgy and requires Internet access, but you'd theoretically have dynamic access to an evolving data set if people actively contribute.

I've attached two command groups here that people can use as a starting point.

Local VC bank -- if you download each spreadsheet in CSV format at the link above and put them in your VC directory, this will read you random jokes or factoids that are in English.
Online VC bank -- you can use this group for the same purpose if you want to scrape the online spreadsheets. The regex isn't as clean, but it's functional.

I think they should work in either VC1 or VC2. As always, just download the file(s) of interest to your desktop, and then drag the file into your command tree *without trying to open the files*. http://voxcommando.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=XML_on_the_forum#Importing_XML_files

[Haddood]

Then, you can either (a) download each spreadsheet as a CSV file and read random responses from those

My be setting a timer to download the file once a day? since it is not mission critical .. maybe even once a week will do

[nime5ter]

Yes, that would be doable if anyone is interested. The best solution I could find for this is actually a "get" request via their api. You can write the CSV-formatted results to file [File.Write -->filename.csv&&{LastResult}], triggered by a timer of your choosing.

[jb5349]

I do like the idea of community collaboration and had a similar idea myself but also see the challenges of it. I have been slowly working on a framework of sorts. Basically a set of basic commands which anyone can use to build their system's personality without having to start from scratch. I am creating a generic personality template which can be expanded upon by anyone.

I do think the XML exchange is good but there isn't a lot of examples on there for general use. I hope to help that be putting out a huge collection of examples and how to tie all of the most common things together. Then if you have a specific system or device you interface with, you can just add a few extra commands or modify what is there so it works with it.