Create follow me button and voice interface to activate and deactivate 'follow me' behaviour

[hopkira]

No description provided.

[amitmangalvedkar]

I am trying to understand the flow here and the need for UI. I believe this is what is needed -

1. End user says "Follow me"
2. The microphone always keeps running and when it hears any word, it sends the voice message to Watson Speech to Text
3. Watson Speech to Text convert this into a textual message
4. The text message is send back to K9 after which K9 keeps following the source.
   Is this ok?

If yes, then

1. What is the role of UI?
2. How does K9 understand whom to follow?

[hopkira]

Hi Amit, great questions!

Voice flow
I already have a voice interface that uses Watson Developer Cloud and Kitt-AI Snowboy https://github.com/hopkira/k9-chess-angular/blob/master/python/ttsrobot.py . You activate that interface by saying "K9" (to Snowboy, which then activates STT) and then "Follow me", "Heel" or similar. Watson Conversation will determine the intent and then communicate something back to the Python program that will kick off the behaviour. YouTube video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cv-R68gX724 and blog post here: http://k9-build.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/eyes.html . This should be a very quick change. We will also need a 'K9, stop following me' kind of intent too....

Who to follow
In terms of who to follow, we are going to cheat; the target will hold a hand-held ultrasonic dog whistle - video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6HSeQ8ULhQ and blog post http://k9-build.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/tube.html

Role of the UI
There is also an Ionic/Cordova hybrid controlller (currently optimised for iPhone) where it would be good to have the ability to activate and deactivate the Follow Me behaviour. The scenario to use this facility is likely to be when we need to activate or deactivate the Follow Me behaviour in a noisy environment (plus it is always good to have a secondary control mechanism). The controller has a number of tabs, one of which shows the collision detection sensor data. I think it is logical that the Follow Me switch should be on that tab (along with a visual indicator of where K9 thinks his target is too). The sensor tab is more for debugging purpose as it doesn't actually do anything currently, but it does look cool. Video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzLbTBhyGxg and blog http://k9-build.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/a-dogs-eye-view.html .