We want to train a visual pet in the sense that the parrot can repeat the things that you teach it, like saying goes, some parrot can talk. However as we know, the parrot can have a mind of its own, too!
Goals of the project:
Mainly entertainment
Novelty: An attempt to combine speech recognition and the talking back from a system in realtime as in to implement code for a conversation between an animal that is able to learn to speak.
Software Requirements:
Photoshop, MS Visual C++, Win2k or higher, MS Speech SDK 5.1
Hardware Requirements:
At least 2.0 GHz Pentium 4, Microphone and Sound
Problems/Challenges to overcome:
We are new what the programming with MS Visual C++ concerns. Having mainly C experience and a basic knowledge of C++ and Java and also Visual Basic we faced the challenge to learn more about C++ while we were trying to understand and modify existing samples in the way we needed for the wanted result.
We were working with different hardware. From a Pentium II 700 MHz 128 MB RAM up to a 2.0GHz Pentium Notebook. And it showed up that the routines we implemented are very dependent on the hardware. Things that look good for a person on one machine seems to be strange on another one. The timing, implementing loops or artificial delays has been a challenge. How to make an interaction with this animal as realistic as possible without to annoy the user of too long delays or compromises he/she has to do in waiting. It still should bring some pleasure and joy to the person, making him/her laugh sometimes. Even when it is just an issue that the program is not able to work so fast as it "should" work. It turned out that it had an interesting and relaxing effect. At least to us. ;-) Hard working is nothing without a slice of fun!