Done & Dusted: SHIO !
The last week was certainly the most challenging, yet the most rewarding for us as a team. We continued this week, just like the last, only now we were trying to figure out speech as an input for our project. All three of us tried to figure out different ways in which we could get speech recognition as an element in our code.
We scoured the internet, trying to look for a solution. We had to work with PyPi, PyAudio, Google api’s, PyWIt, Snack, Tkinter, etc., and had to download, install and create accounds on multiple platforms to test the credibility of each of our options. The issue was, that in order to make use of one particular package, a host of other libraries or packages had to be installed on the system before calling all of them to work.
Amongst our multiple failures in doing so, we finally found one method that worked for us. Another challenge, was trying to find a method that worked on Windows. There are so many options available to MAC systems, and our group had no MAC laptops, we were all stuck with Windows systems. But now, that we’ve learnt so much, I’m grateful that we were forced to work with our Windows systems and not have the easy way out using a MAC system.
Once we figured out what worked for us, we had to implement it in our code. We had problems with the sensitivity of the audio being recorded by the system. It was very difficult to get a response where there was a lot of disturbance detected; therefore, we worked in a closed, quiet room. We were then able to see the working of the code, where it would detect the response and answer accordingly. We edited certain parts of the code, to concise it further. We cleaned it up and added comments wherever necessary and we also made use of web-browsing in our code, linking a YouTube video as a call to action when there is a certain kind of input.
We managed to complete all that we set out to complete for our prototype. Therefore, our prototype as of now is a laptop based chat-bot interface that requires speech as an input, and provides a speech based output as well. Along with this, the speech that is input is displayed on the screen as well as the output (chat-bot interface) We hope to carry forward this project and even complete the Game aspect of the concept we had at the beginning.
The struggle was more than real to us all. This led to some sleepless nights, and dropping another course to focus on this one, and we did that because this just happens to be our major, and because we had a keen interest in seeing this project through.
Truth be told, no matter how challenging this was for us, I really enjoyed this course. It was probably the course that I have learnt the most from since I began college. There’s a lot more to learn, but there’s also more confidence to take on the challenge of coding.
I don’t see coding as a burden now. And now that I’ve completed a project like this, coding doesn’t seem like that huge a mountain to climb. And I feel ready to take on coding work that lies ahead. Practice and experience with code like this certainly broadened my horizon in the sense that I felt restricted to the UX aspect of things, but now I feel like exploring UI more and probably even take up a career that involves both aspects of HCD.
