This week is rather busy for me, so I decided to do something more lighthearted to escape for a minute the ever present dread of finals week. Here I found some fun ideas for personal projects related to Conversational User Interfaces. Though some substitute conversation for other fun ideas, the idea behind them remains the same. Without further ado, enjoy!
Legend of Alexa:
This is a fun video by Allen Pan on his channel, Sufficiently Advanced. Whats cool about this project is that a) he made a home automation system himself, and b) he made it to be tuned to a musical instrument instead of voice commands. In more simple terms, he made an Alexa that responds to songs from the Legend of Zelda game series. The system detects notes being played and then can determine if the song played matches any of its instructions. This project made me think about what other ways we could interact with things such as voice user interfaces. We already have the capability for hobbyists to create their own VUI and even small applets for some of the major available VUIs. What other ways to interact via sound can you think of?
Voice and Body:
So we already have chatbots and voice user interfaces. Companies have already used them to bring characters to life to interact with the general public. Examples of this include the Disney promotional chatbot, featuring Judy Hopps of Zootopia and an Albert Einstein themed chatbot from National Geographic. Take that idea and apply it to a live animated character and I think we’re going somewhere. Services such as Adobe Character Animator allow for live mouth animation for 2D characters. The system is based on detecting sounds, so in theory a voice user interface would be enough to trigger the animation. If people were engaged by a text conversation with Albert Einstein, boy would kids go crazy over getting to talk to an actual, albeit probably cartoonish, Einstein. Now this would need to be clear that it’s a bot and has limited functionality, but it could be a great way to spice up the science wing at a big city museum. Would you want to talk to a cartoon historical figure?
The Furlexa:
Now the title of my post makes a bit more sense, huh? Well, congratulations, you are cursed and can never take this forbidden knowledge back. Apparently there is a large community of people who hack Furbies, and one committed developer by the name of Zack, from Howchoo, turned one into an Alexa. Basically he replaced the voice of the furby with an Alexa and made the furby move to match the language of the Alexa. While one of the more strange points on here, I think it is a nice segue to talk about housing of the VUI. Currently VUIs are stored in sleek, less noticeable, housing. But would people be more invested in it if we brought in some concepts from Social Robotics? What if we gave Alexa or Siri a face that you could interact with on a more human level? I love the idea of fun little characters helping out your kids with their math homework after school to get them invested in learning. What thoughts do you have about how we should house these unbodied voices?
I hope these fun projects got you thinking about more than just the current standard design of Voice User Interfaces. Finally, if you didn’t think I was crazy yet, heres ANOTHER furby project!
Further (not crazy) Reading: