We are busy implementing small scenarios/concepts for students of ROILA so that they can interact with Mindstorm NXT robots while talking in ROILA. One of them is a simple shooting game, where we wanted to get the color sensor to work. However the “new” color sensor in Mindstorms NXT 2.0 does not work with lejos NXJ 0.8 and neither with some versions of 0.85. Please use the following classes.jar file to make your sensor work, courtesy of the lejos team. Remember to replace your old version of the jar file in two places: lib folder in the projects folder and lib folder where you installed lejos. A simple replace worked for us and we did not have to rebuild any code. But, remember to download your java program on the NXT again.
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Tags: Color Sensor, Lejos, Light Sensor
At this moment we are busy designing lessons for ROILA. These lessons will be used by high school students to learn ROILA in our upcoming project. We are using Moodle an open source e-learning tool. Moodle provides various functionalities and features which make designing lessons fun and simple. One of the interesting challenges that we are contemplating is how to provide a dictionary or a glossary with audio pronunciations of ROILA words. An alternative could be to accomplish this externally using word press on the ROILA website (see first version). We aim to use Text to Speech recordings as the sample pronunciations for ROILA as that would be consistent and efficient. The recognition accuracy of the TTS sentence recordings was found to be very high (just 1 word error in about 120+ words) for a list of 30 sentences. This figure was generated by passing recordings offline in the Sphinx-4 recognizer.
Tags: Moodle, ROILA lessons
We are extremely pleased and grateful that Christiaan Huygens College Rachmaninowlaan in Eindhoven has agreed to cooperate with us in the ROILA project. Children from third grade (14-15 years old) will be learning ROILA and using it to play games with LEGO robots. This activity will be part of their Science Class and we expect the ROILA learning to last for 3-4 weeks with a final one week used for the evaluation and game play. As a token of appreciation we will be donating LEGO Mindstorms NXT kits to the school.
We are extremely pleased to welcome two additional members to our team who will be helping us in this project. Hanneke Hooft van Huysduynen (Final Year Bachelor Student at Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology) will be helping with the design of the game(s) and the execution of the study. Jerry Muelver (President of North American Ido Society, Inc) is assisting us by designing the ROILA lessons and lectures. We welcome his expertise with artificial languages and conlangs.
We will post updates and details as soon as they become available.
Tags: children, Evaluation, High school
Ubuntu users will find it quite easy to install and use Festival for Text to Speech. The following link gives the details:
We would strongly recommend to use Ubuntu to run TTS. Compiling and building Festival on Windows is quite a task. All of this means that ultimately we are faced with two choices when implementing a complete application for ROILA, since we had configured the Lejos NXT platform on Windows.
- Setup lejos on Ubuntu, including Bluetooth support.
- Use the text2wave utility in Festival to generate wav files on Ubuntu. These wav files can then be played from within Java when running NXT programs on Windows.
We have prepared a simple script that generates wav files of any number of sentences written in a text file using approach 2. Of course the disadvantage is that TTS is done offline and one would need to know beforehand the plausible list of sentences that the NXT robot could say. If someone has hands on experience with approach 1 please let us know.
Tags: festival, text to speech, Ubuntu, Windows
We were pleased to be a part of the IceTAL 2010 conference in Reykjavik, Iceland, where we presented our work on ROILA. The published version of the paper is now available in the publications section. Needless to say we also had great fun exploring Reykjavik and the natural beauty of Iceland (see pictures below of the Church of Hallgrímur, the Gullfoss Waterfall and the Strokkur Geysir).
Tags: Iceland, IceTAL 2010, Reykjavik
We have received several queries/comments on some important words that are missing in the initial ROILA vocabulary. For e.g. there is no word for robot. We have apple, but no eat. We have shirt, but no pants, and no wear. By using Basic English and its 800 or so constituent words as the vocabulary we are obviously constrained by our design decision. Fortunately, ROILA words are generated automatically by a genetic algorithm, therefore to extend the vocabulary is only a matter of rerunning the algorithm with slightly modified parameters so that the algorithm takes into account the existing vocabulary and does not discard it completely.
Consequently we see the following approach can solve the problem of certain missing words:
We re-run the genetic algorithm so that it generates a new vocabulary comprising of 100 “wild card” words besides the same original 800 ROILA words. ROILA users could then assign any meaning to any word from those 100 wild card words. Of course it can always be another number than 100, it could be more or less depending on the requirements. The genetic algorithm will be responsible of ensuring that the new vocabulary has words which are acoustically different from each other. We will be providing the list of 100 wild card ROILA words very soon.
Here is the list that we promised, 100 new ROILA words in no particular order: sisol, melowe, mowif, pawowu, foje, pepase, wojas, lobo, wobis, japaf, bofet, tenut, totab, lajak, nafose, kisofo, wabuk, powijo, nosil, bifut, jusefu, koset, mepof, mobali, tamis, juwisa, nafob, memab, jesen, sunob, sisot, fekef, loji, jesel, jitat, fibi, tunik, jetate, lumoj, nubuk, wutema, silif, wilaf, lulos, sekefa, kukip, kutil, tewajo, fesopi, fesamu, wujifi, bapan, bileki, nilin, malolu, patosi, koko, nokab, palana, samup, metin, jamena, wutose, winilo, nojoja, waboki, pajib, mibilu, soteju, pewepa, pupapo, metoja, tele, kewub, bowaj, limim, poban, kalalu, mapib, ponob, nefimu, baluw, nokej, nuketo, pike, tafoba, pakawe, tumib, pojos, nikabo, sopip, sesip, bulo, lapun, nelale, kabeta, fipos, pafes, mukeni, jekemi
Tags: new words, vocabulary
We are pleased to inform that Wetenschap 24 (a Dutch media company that reports on state of art scientific research) did a video interview and report on ROILA. Find the 3 minute clip below. The video was also broadcast on Nederland 2 (a local dutch channel) as part of the program Science Flash. The report (in dutch) can be found here.
Tags: interview, video, Wetenschap 24
We are pleased to inform you that we have made some progress with getting Festival TTS going for ROILA. As always feedback and comments are welcome. Please note that this is still work in progress.
Here are the initial results (for sake of consistency, we provide audio files of sample sentences that are also discussed elsewhere)
fosit koloke
fosit nole
buse fosit
bama buse fosit
bobuja
fosit jimeja
fosit kipupi
fosit webufo
fosit besati
The output from text to speech was also passed to the Sphinx-4 speech recognizer and the recognition results were good.
Several steps are required to accomplish TTS for ROILA and ultimately to get your audio files. We will post details very soon so that everyone can have their machines talk in ROILA!
Acknowledgement: We would like to thank Steve Pomeroy for providing a sample script of how to enable Festival to speak in artificial languages. We would also like to thank Alex Juarez for helping in running Festival on Linux.
Tags: festival, text to speech
We would like to appreciate the considerable interest that has been generated recently for ROILA. We thank everyone for their comments, feedback and kind suggestions. We aim to get back to everyone as soon as possible and address the valuable points that have been raised with regards to the design of the ROILA language.
Currently we are working on the speech synthesis stage of our project. We aim to have a text to speech engine that can speak ROILA at will. For this purpose we are playing around with Festival, which is an open source tts engine. Festival also goes by its CMU name of Festvox. If you have any pointers (practical experience) about the following, please do contact us:
- Implementing a new voice in Festival
- Implementing a new language in Festival
- Employing the use of Festival within the LEGO NXT platform
Moreover we have also found an online tool CMU Spice which provides a platform where new languages can be evaluated from both a speech recognition and a speech synthesis perspective. If you have had a successful experience with it, please do contact us as well.
Tags: cmu spice, festival, text to speech
