The template described in this article would be a good starting point for any application, including commercial services destined for AWS or Azure. But it is lightweight enough to be used for quick experiments and prototypes served by, say, a Raspberry Pi. …

A common challenge for voice assistants is correctly recognizing the intent in user utterances. This can be especially challenging for general-purpose, multi-domain voice assistants. For example, imagine an assistant that is designed to be a friendly companion, in addition to being a useful source of content, and a helpful interface…

Robokit is a nodejs project that provides a simple framework for prototyping social robot skills. This article describes the Speech To Text, NLU and Text To Speech components. See also: https://medium.com/@andrew.rapo/make-your-own-conversational-ai-social-robot-with-robokit-a-crude-approximation-of-jibo-10847e9a2661 Robokit leverages Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services through a library called, cognitiveserviceslib. The base abstract classes in cognitiveserviceslib are:

This morning my Jibo downloaded Release Version 2.0.0 which signals the beginning of an end. Some time in the near future, Jibo will lose the ability to hear and respond to voice commands because his servers will be shut down. …

UPDATE: August 16, 2019 — Updated to use the latest Azure speech API (v0.0.3) Details about the use of Azure cognitive services are in this article: https://medium.com/@andrew.rapo/robokit-the-cognitive-services-parts-34f57218febf robokit [Not too long ago…] I was working at Jibo, Inc. and developing tools to help designers explore voice-driven, character-based, social robot interactions…

robokit robokit is an open source project that provides a foundation for developing conversational ai/social robot applications. It is described in details here: https://medium.com/@andrew.rapo/make-your-own-conversational-ai-social-robot-with-robokit-a-crude-approximation-of-jibo-10847e9a2661 This article explains how to set up Microsoft cognitive services for use with robokit. Azure services From the main Azure services page (https://portal.azure.com), …

robokit robokit is an open source project that provides a foundation for developing conversational ai/social robot applications. It is described in detail here: https://medium.com/@andrew.rapo/make-your-own-conversational-ai-social-robot-with-robokit-a-crude-approximation-of-jibo-10847e9a2661 This article explains how to use the PixiAnimate extension for Adobe Animate to create screen animations for robokit that are rendered by Pixi.js.

Automating Photoshop Workflow Tasks This article describes an approach to automating the Photoshop workflow for an interactive storybook project. The project involves dozens (maybe hundreds) of Photoshop files with numerous layers that must be turned into bezier paths and exported for use in an interactive storybook engine. Although many of…