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Cooperation with Christiaan Huygens College Rachmaninowlaan in Eindhoven

September 27, 2010 in News by mubin | No comments

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.

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Festival on Ubuntu

September 23, 2010 in News by mubin | 1 comment

Ubuntu users will find it quite easy to install and use Festival for Text to Speech. The following link gives the details:

Festival on Ubuntu

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.

  1. Setup lejos on Ubuntu, including Bluetooth support.
  2. 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.

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Extending the ROILA vocabulary

August 23, 2010 in News by mubin | No comments

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

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ROILA Reportage by Wetenschap 24 for Science Flash

July 29, 2010 in News by mubin | No comments

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.

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Media Hype

July 27, 2010 in News by bartneck | No comments

It is interesting to observe how the media hype works. We originally gave a hint to one blog and from there on many blogs and news web sites took notice of our project. Within 2-3 days we received a massive number of visits, but as quickly as it started, it also faded. The traditional media is a bit slower and a television interview will be broadcast next Thursday.

Statistics of our website of the last days.

First Attempts with Festival for Text to Speech for ROILA

July 27, 2010 in News by mubin | 6 comments

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.

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News Coverage

July 19, 2010 in News by bartneck | No comments

Our project has a attracted a considerable media attention. Here is the coverage as far as we are aware of it.

August 3rd

July 30th

July 26th

July 25th

July 22nd

July 19th

July 18th

July 17th

July 16th

July 15th

July 14th

July 13th

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Thank you for the feedback and comments

July 17, 2010 in News by mubin | No comments

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.

Festival Text to Speech and CMU Spice

July 14, 2010 in News by mubin | 2 comments

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:

  1. Implementing a new voice in Festival
  2. Implementing a new language in Festival
  3. 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.

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Cooperation with LEGO Mindstorms

July 14, 2010 in News by mubin | No comments

We would like to appreciate the continued support of LEGO Mindstorms. They have donated 20 NXT kits and 1 cubic meter of LEGO Technic in support of the ROILA project. We aim to reward the children who will eventually learn ROILA with the NXT kits. Recently there was also a post about our project on the LEGO NXT Mindstorms blog and on Popular Science.

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