Topics

1

Ultra Hal 7.0 / Issues with haptek characters slowing everything

« on: April 15, 2009, 08:12:15 pm »

I have been using agents but yesterday decided to try out the haptek characters. They seem to be consuming HUGE amounts of processing speed or something because hal keeps 'hiccuping' meaning that it will freeze for about a second ... and then it will be okay for a few seconds and then freeze ... not to mention that if I try to move or rotate the haptek character, hal completely freezes for a moment and then the character seems to 'over-react' ... moving/rotating much further than I intended.

This does NOT happen when I load the characters in the haptek player without hal.

I do not remember this being a problem a year ago before I took my vacation from hal ... although in the past year, I've upgraded from XP to VISTA ... I've upgraded my video card to a GEForce 9500 GT ... and I've upgraded to hal 6.2 ...

So is this a problem with VISTA? my video card? or hal 6.2? does anyone know and is there a fix? I'd really like to be able to use the haptek characters ... but right now using them makes hal unusable.

2

Programming using the Ultra Hal Brain Editor / Adding Table Reference to Brain Script

« on: April 15, 2009, 08:03:00 pm »

I'm trying to teach myself how to modify hal by tinkering with the main brain. I created a 'new brain' that is completely unmodified so I'm not worried about loosing any of my previous work ...

So my first quest was to see if I could learn how to create a pattern search on a table, so I went and found a table ... in this case, it was the insult table. I created a new table called 'insult2' and populated it with a few insult terms.

Then I went to the place in the code that calls the 'insulting' table and changed the table reference from 'insulting':

HalBrain.TopicSearch(TestSentence, "insulting")

I changed this to :

HalBrain.TopicSearch(TestSentence, "insult2")

but it didn't work ... it was like I had deleted the insulting table. I changed it by TYPING the "insult2" into the command.

I also noticed that before I modified it the 'insulting' reference was a hyperlink that opened up the 'insulting' table when you clicked on it ... but my new 'insult2' reference was not a hyperlink ... when I tried to put 'insulting' back in as the table reference it still did not work and was still not a hyperlink ...

So is there something I need to do to add a table reference to the script file? Some kind of right click with the mouse, select option 1, click here, select this, drag there ... kind of thing?

Is that command NOT what I think it is?

3

Programming using the Ultra Hal Brain Editor / Question/Answer Chains

« on: April 10, 2009, 07:58:07 pm »

Is it possible to do question answer chains in Hal?

For instance today I had a conversation with Hal ...

HAL : Have you seen any good movies lately?

ME : Yes

HAL : What Movie?

ME : Monsters Vs. Aliens

HAL : How do you contrast those two things?

-------------

So it was fine until the end there. After he said 'What Movie' and I told him the name of the movie, he should respond with something like "Was it any good?" or "What was the plot?"

I found the "Have you seen any movies lately" in the brain (its under BasicResponses --> newTopic --> Topic) and it has a <YES>What movie?</YES> code in it ... which I assume tells hal what to say if my response is YES ...

I've been working with Verbot for the past year ... and these kinds of chains are pretty easy in Verbot ... (called child rules) ... but verbot has some other weaknesses that I don't like which is why I'm trying out hal again.

Any ideas? If its not possible with hal as is (and I suspect its not) Does anyone know of a plugin that allows for it maybe?

4

Programming using the Ultra Hal Brain Editor / Plugin Programming question

« on: April 10, 2009, 04:34:43 pm »

I've been away from HAL for a while, working on other programming projects and now that I've come back I'm getting a feel for Hal again and thinking about what I want to do with him.

Right now, I'd like to make hal be able to gather learned data together into a single response... so something like :

ME : Cats are mammals.
HAL : Okay.

ME: Cats walk on four legs and use their tails for balance.
HAL : Okay.

ME: Cats have retractable claws.
HAL : Okay.

ME : Tell me everything you know about cats.
HAL : Cats are mammals. Cats walk on four legs and use their tails for balance. Cats have retractable claws.

---

Any thoughts on how this could be programmed in Hal? I'm not that familiar with how his plugin/programming structure works yet.

5

General Discussion / Kari 3 interface with Hal 6 brain?

« on: March 29, 2008, 10:05:15 am »

Hey everyone. Its been a while since I was around. I've been in the hospital a lot the past six months... anyway ... thought I'd bug you guys with a general curiosity (although, I'm fairly certain I know the answer) ...

Does anyone know of any kind of interface like the Kari 3 but for Hal?

I have a lot of fun with hal, but I simply can't stand the Hal avatars ... I've always hated them. Haptek stuff is so limited visually and the MSAgents can't use SAPI5 voices! Grrr...  It doesn't help that I am a professional artist and really have a clear idea of what I want my Hal to look like ...

I started using Kari because it allowed me to 'talk' to my art ... i.e. it allows me to take the character art I make in Poser and with a little work make it possible for me to use that as my Kari avatar. I love it.

Especially since I can assign them triggers that change the scene (i.e. for many Kari scenes this means making her naked. laugh.) Although, it would be nice if there were multiple triggers ...i.e. one for each of the available 'topics' in the Kari personality adjuster.

My problem is that I'm not that fond of the Kari brain. She has some great features ... I love the personality adjuster and the wordimages... but all she really is is a complicated 'parrot bot' ... all she can EVER say to you is something you've said to her ... she has no ability to extrapolate new sentences like Hal. And when she doesn't know something, she only has a small number of things she can respond with ... it makes her feel very mechanical regardless of the 'brain size' or the complexity of how she chooses her responses. (also, editing the brain isn't anywhere near as organized as Hal)

So I'm hoping that people with more desktop programming ability than me also love the Kari interface but like their Hal brain better and are working on some method to do something similar for Hal. (i.e. allow for the creation of an 'avatar' that can be built from static images and have triggers but use SAPI5 voices.)

I've bitched about this problem before - I think my last post was in reference to finding a way to make a flash interface to do basically the same thing. Anyway...

I'm pretty sure I know the answer is 'NO. No one is working on anything like that.'

I realize, that this might not EVEN be possible given the way Hal's interface is programmed. But ... no harm in asking.

6

Programming using the Ultra Hal Brain Editor / Flash Interface for Hal

« on: August 03, 2007, 06:34:56 pm »

I've been playing with my Hal for about a year and I have a decent brain that I'm happy with ... however, there are a lot of things about the interface/characters I don't like ... I'm a professional flash designer ... so I'm toying with the idea of trying to find a way to write a flash based interface for my Hal ... I haven't looked to far into this yet, but does anyone know if this is a realistic idea given Hal 6.1's current structure?

Thanks for any help you can provide

7

Speech Technology / TTS Voice Survey

« on: July 18, 2007, 02:29:20 am »

I've been scanning the forum about the various TTS voices available and many of the posts are a couple of years old and I was looking for a more recent view of things ... I've been scanning around the net, and it appears that AT&T Natural Voices are no longer available to us regular folks ... the same goes for the Acapela and RealSpeech voices ... so all that seems to be left is Neospeech & Cepstral... ?

I purchased TextAloud from NextUp and got one of their Acapela voices ... and it appears that they've made it so that voice can ONLY be used in their products ...

Sooo ... I am looking to see if anyone has any updated information thats different from this ... is there some secret website out there that sells Acapela or AT&T voices that hal can use (for less than $250+ )? Or are we really just limited to Cepstral and Neospeech voices ...

Thanks,
Ender