Stephanie, open-source virtual assistant built to control and automate tasks

https://slapbot.github.io/

by PleaseHelpMe • 9 years ago

77 68 9 years ago

slapbot.github.io

Pfhreak2• 9 years ago

Someday, someone will buck the trend of naming their voice assistant with a woman's name. Sadly, today is not that day.

ihuman• 9 years ago

What's wrong with the trend?

Pfhreak2• 9 years ago

The use of (nearly exclusively?) women's names and voices for servant roles? It continues a stereotype that I believe is problematic.

epse• 9 years ago

Also, if Stephanie is a hot word and someone called Stephanie comes by...

nerdponx• 9 years ago

To be fair, Siri is androgynous enough and could be given a man's voice by default.

peteretep• 9 years ago

I gave Siri a male voice right out of the bag, and keep forgetting other people have female Siris. Having Butler Siri feels classy...

lucaspiller• 9 years ago

In the UK, Siri has a male voice by default.

rexpop• 9 years ago

elliot.ai

namlem• 9 years ago

I'm more bothered by the fact that the name is three syllables. Ain't nobody got time for that.

d2p• 9 years ago

Maybe deliberate to reduce false activations? Even with three, our Echo Dot triggers many times per day when nobody is talking to "her"!

nathanasmith7• 9 years ago

Let 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• 9 years ago

Personification 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.

bruxis• 9 years ago

Yeah, I really don't want a voice assistant with the name of an ex.

PleaseHelpMe2• 9 years ago

Seriously? Then you should try Google since I believe no girl has OK GOOGLE name

amelius• 9 years ago

Also, 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• 9 years ago

I 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.

_jtrig3• 9 years ago

This is exactly the kind of IoT I was hoping for. Not the bastardized corporate data-mining kind.

Hope this project keeps growing!

whyagaindavid2• 9 years ago

It uses speech to text from Google/MS/Facebook/IBM/SoundCloud with your API key

https://slapbot.github.io/documentation/configuration/

crawfordcomeaux3• 9 years ago

I wonder how easy it'd be to add support for Sphinx via Python's SpeechRecognition package...

Eridrus• 9 years ago

Has 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....

This is about as technically interesting as the Jarvis this takes inspiration from.

_jtrig3• 9 years ago

There'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.

Dunedan• 9 years ago

The website is a way better source than the Github repo: https://slapbot.github.io/

acidburnNSA• 9 years ago

It looks great. Started watching the pitch video...somebody get that guy a decent microphone!!

markatkinson• 9 years ago

I came here to 2nd this!

dang4• 9 years ago

OK, we changed to that from https://github.com/slapbot/stephanie-va.

notgood3• 9 years ago

How 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.

backpropaganda3• 9 years ago

Whoa slow down there fella, or you're going to run out of red pills.

notgood3• 9 years ago

I not once have entered that subreddit; my opinions were formed completely by myself; shocking I know.

crawfordcomeaux3• 9 years ago

None 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• 9 years ago

This 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?

dang4• 9 years ago

Please don't take HN threads on this sort of ideological tangent. The original point was at least partly on topic; this is way off in the flames.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14530866 and marked it off-topic.

backpropaganda3• 9 years ago

I don't approve of this decision. If discussion about how AI assistants have female names are on-topic, then so is the rebuttal that "AI assistants having female names is a non-issue". I like you, dang, but I think you added your own ideological bias in making this decision.

belorn2• 9 years ago

Could you explain how gender stereotyping and gender equality is on topic with the text in the article?

Or to phrase it in an other way: if there was a bot farming karma by commenting with "Why is there no male named virtual assistants" in every article posted on HN with "virtual assistant" in the title, would the bot be on topic just because of the title?

Animats2• 9 years ago

Nice. Anyone interested in porting this to Android to replace Google voice-driven services? F-Droid needs this.

nathanasmith7• 9 years ago

The 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/

whyagaindavid2• 9 years ago

https://slapbot.github.io/documentation/configuration/

Sadly not possible with fdroid if it has api keys from proprietary services.

Animats2• 9 years ago

Oh, 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• 9 years ago

Cool! Any video demo or anything of this anywhere?

PleaseHelpMe2• 9 years ago

This may be helpful to you : https://youtu.be/Pp5dXbWZsrU?t=1m40s

microcolonel2• 9 years ago

There 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.

nathanasmith7• 9 years ago

For 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

Edit: Fixed! They fixed it by wrapping that line in an if statement checking the output of sys.platform. Very responsive dev.

GordonS• 9 years 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• 9 years ago

I 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• 9 years ago

I'm sure this is a great project, but for once, it would be wonderful if Virtual Assistants weren't named after women.

nathanasmith7• 9 years ago

We'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• 9 years ago

Firstly, 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.

wcummings• 9 years ago

Slapbot?

Stephanie, open-source virtual assistant built to control and automate tasks

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