Messages

1096

Programming using the Ultra Hal Brain Editor / K.I.T.T. plug-in for Hal

« on: March 31, 2003, 12:15:51 am »

The easiest thing to start with would be the skin for the program. You can draw a skin and the 4 button's that go along with it and enter all the coordinates into a Hal UHP file. Take a look at how the skin file brain.uhp (in Hal's folder) is setup to get an idea how to do this.

To create the animated character you could either make an MSAgent type character by using the tools at http://www.microsoft.com/msagent or if you want to make a propietary Hal character (requires VB knowledge) you can follow http://www.zabaware.com/assistant/character.html

Unless you are able to afford the voice creation tools from AT&T http://www.naturalvoices.com and hire the actor that did KITT's voice, you will not be able to create a voice just like KIIT's.  You can play around with presets of all your installed voices in the speech control panel to attempt to get the closest resembling voice.

As for the personality, you can use the Ultra Hal Brain Editor to create a new "KITT" brain. If you don't know VB, you can simply edit the databases from the menu system to edit Hal's responses to seem more like you think KITT would.

1097

Ultra Hal 7.0 / Hal - Bug with appointments

« on: March 31, 2003, 12:03:10 am »

This is a known bug that will be fixed in Ultra Hal Assistant 5.0.

This bug only occurs though, if it is the first entry in the appointment book data file. If you have other entries in the appointment book, it should work ok. For example if you first say "I have an appointment in 2 days at 1:00 pm" and then say "I have a chemistry quiz on April 2, 2003 at noon." it will work.

This is the only current workaround that I know of. I appologize for the bug, it will be fixed in Hal 5.0.

1098

Ultra Hal 7.0 / Having trouble with voice Recognition too (II?)

« on: March 30, 2003, 11:46:42 pm »

There really is no difference in speech recognition from Ultra Hal Assistant 4.0 to 4.5. Both use the Microsoft SAPI 5.1 speech recognition engine. Ultra Hal Assistant 3.0 used SAPI 5.0, Ultra Hal Assistant 1.0 and 2.0 used SAPI 4.0. The Microsoft SAPI 5.1 engine is the same engine used in Office XP. Have any of you with Office XP tried speech recognition in there? Do you get the same results, better, worse?

Did you know Hal is compatible with almost all speech recognition engines available on the market? Engines such as IBM ViaVoice and Dragon Naturally speaking are all compatible with Hal. Maybe other engines will work better for you then the Microsoft engine.

Ultra Hal Assistant 5.0 (to be released sometime in the next 6 months) will have an added feature that will allow you to limit the vocabulary size that the engine listens to. Instead of the engine listening to a vocabulary of around 50000 it can be limited to a lower number like 10000 or 5000 or 2000. Most people's everyday vocabulary doesn't go past 5000 words. Limiting the size of the vocabulary can improve the engine results somewhat.

1099

Ultra Hal 7.0 / Any suggestions for Ultra Hal Assistant 5.0?

« on: March 27, 2003, 08:10:03 pm »

Ultra Hal Assistant 5.0 is currently in active development.

The following improvements are being worked on:

• The Haptek 3D Character Engine will be incorporated into Hal. This will offer a new level of realism for Hal. Many of Hal's characters will be remade into the Haptek format and a huge library of new characters will be added. See a demo of this engine in action at www.haptek.com


• Ultra Hal will be compatible with software called People Putty from www.haptek.com allowing anyone to easily create 3D characters for Hal either from scratch or from a photograph of a real person.


• More advanced control over speech recognition will be implemented in Hal. Instead of Hal listening to a library of over 50,000+ words as it does now, the user will be able to limit Hal's vocabulary to a more efficient 2000 words or so. This will greatly improve Hal's speech recognition ability.


• Control over how Hal animates its characters will be given to an editable VBScript. This will allow each character to have its own personality in terms of how it emotionally reacts and what animations its capable of.


• The Ultra Hal AIM Bot connection routine will be moved into an editable VBScript, and it will check Zabaware's site for updates. This way when AOL changes its protocol, it won't render the program unusable as it has in the past.


• The registered version of the Ultra Hal AIM Bot will no longer send out Zabaware disclaimers.


• Ultra Hal's calendar functions will be made region aware to accept formats like Day-Month-Year instead of the US format of Month-Day-Year


• Ultra Hal's internet functions will be expanded and made international friendly also. Ultra Hal will be able to tell you the weather if you live outside of the US.


• The Ultra Hal Brain Editor will be greatly improved. It will now have a "novice" and "expert" mode which will hide some of the complexity of the program such as the VBScript and many of the databases from users just wishing to teach Hal a few things manually.


• Hal's conversational database will be about 75% larger, allowing Hal to converse intelligently about more topics then ever before. Hal's AI engine will also be improve to allow Hal to work better with the data that it has available.


• The format of Hal's Q&A databases will be changed to allow for faster proccessing. Overall, the speed of Hal's thinking should remain about the same since the database size is increasing as well.


• A slider option will be added into Hal's Brain Options to allow you to control the emphasis placed on information learned by Hal from you. This will allow you to setup Hal to use responses Hal learned from you even if Hal thinks he can respond on his own more intelligently. Basically, the user will have some control over the threshold value that Hal uses to determine if a learned response is more intelligent then Hal's standard response.

An exact release date has not been set, but it will most likely be released in mid-August. Upgrades will be free for all people who purchase Ultra Hal Assistant 4.5 from 3/25/03 until the release day of Ultra Hal Assistant 5.0. All other registered users will be able to upgrade at half cost.

Zabaware would like to hear from you what other changes you would like to see in Ultra Hal Assistant 5.0. Are there any minor annoyances, bugs, or interface features you would like changed? Any major features you would like added? If it is feasible to implement your suggestions without pushing the release date too far it will be done.

1100

Ultra Hal 7.0 / Brain Files

« on: March 26, 2003, 10:20:44 am »

Yes, you can copy and paste one brain file into the other with a text editor like notepad. Just be sure not to add or remove any additional lines.

1101

Ultra Hal 7.0 / Password

« on: March 26, 2003, 10:15:56 am »

You have all been sent out a password by email. The ordering page has also been modified to bold, underline, write in a larger font, and highlight in yellow the password from now on.

1102

Ultra Hal 7.0 / Program Does not install for Windows XP!!!

« on: March 23, 2003, 06:13:44 pm »

Try doing a custom install and do a minimal install with most of the characters not turned on. If that works, run the installation again (without uninstalling) and just add on components. Can you narrow it down to which component is not working?

1103

Ultra Hal 7.0 / Program Does not install for Windows XP!!!

« on: March 20, 2003, 01:19:53 pm »

Try Method #1 and Method #3 as listed on http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=314810

Also turn off the virus checking software during the installation.

[Download Attachment:]

1104

Ultra Hal 7.0 / Free download not learning

« on: March 19, 2003, 07:56:44 pm »

Check out some of the posts made by Don Ferguson. http://www.zabaware.com/forum/search.asp?mode=DoIt&MEMBER_ID=274
He has many good posts that go into a lot of detail on how Hal learns.

I have created a plugin file for you that will turn off the character for you. It is attached to the bottom of this message. Simply copy the file into Hal's program folder which is usually "C:/program files/zabaware/ultra hal assistant 4" and choose "Hal - No Character" in Hal's general options as your character.

Download Attachment: nochar.uhp
551 Bytes

1105

Ultra Hal 7.0 / Program Does not install for Windows XP!!!

« on: March 19, 2003, 07:43:50 pm »

Check out the first entry on the troubleshooting page http://www.zabaware.com/assistant/trouble.html

This occurs if you have Windows XP with Service Pack 1, a computer with over 256 MB RAM, and an installation program over 100 MB that utilizes the Windows Installer Service.

1106

Ultra Hal 7.0 / UltraHal on aol's im

« on: February 23, 2003, 06:12:41 pm »

We usually have 3 AIM Bots running under the following screen names: UltraHal, UltraHal2, and DubyaGrgBush

You can run up to 7 AIM Bots at once on the same computer without major problems. The limit of 7 comes from AOL not allowing 1 IP address to have too many screen names running at the same time. Since you created a different brain for both bots, you will have no problems at all running 2 at once. It is also possible to run the same brain on multiple bots if you have learning turned off. If you attempt to run the same brain on multiple bots with learning turned on there is a chance that both will want to write something they have learned to the same file at once and this will cause one of them to crash. However, with learning off or seperate brains there is no problem.

[Download Attachment:]

1107

Programming using the Ultra Hal Brain Editor / PROCESS:NEVER SAY THAT AGAIN

« on: February 23, 2003, 05:54:41 pm »

quote:Originally posted by brianstorm

I had some setbacks so far- the 16 variables used in the script are all the front end recognizes, so it's looking like I might have to sacrifice some of Hal's negative emotions to get something passed back for this thing. It's still in the 'puzzle' stage, but it oughta be pretty cool if it'll work.

There's no reason to sacrifice any variables. Using a little encoding/decoding trick you can use 1 variable to store an unlimited amount of variables.

Attached to the bottom of this message is a modified Hal 4.5 UHP brain that shows how this can be done.

Basically, the following code was added:

This was added to the beggining of the GetResponse function:

quote:
   '*********************
    'Example of using CustomMem to store several custom variables
    'Decode many custom variables out of the CustomMem variable
    TestVar1 = DecodeVar(CustomMem, "TestVar1")
    TestVar2 = DecodeVar(CustomMem, "TestVar2")
    TestVar3 = DecodeVar(CustomMem, "TestVar3")
    TestVar4 = DecodeVar(CustomMem, "TestVar4")
   'We output the variables values to the debug string
    DebugInfo = DebugInfo & "TestVar1:" & TestVar1 & vbCrLf
    DebugInfo = DebugInfo & "TestVar2:" & TestVar2 & vbCrLf
    DebugInfo = DebugInfo & "TestVar3:" & TestVar3 & vbCrLf
    DebugInfo = DebugInfo & "TestVar4:" & TestVar4 & vbCrLf
    'We assign various random values to the variables if they are empty
    'These values chosen during the first run should be kept in memory
    'for the entire conversation
    If TestVar1 = "" Then TestVar1 = Int(RND * 100)
    If TestVar2 = "" Then TestVar2 = Int(RND * 100)
    If TestVar3 = "" Then TestVar3 = Int(RND * 100)
    If TestVar4 = "" Then TestVar4 = Int(RND * 100)
    'We encode all the custom variables back into the CustomMem variable
   CustomMem = EncodeVar(TestVar1, "TestVar1") & EncodeVar(TestVar2, "TestVar2") & EncodeVar(TestVar3, "TestVar3") & EncodeVar(TestVar4, "TestVar4")
   '*********************

These 2 functions were added to the end of the UHP file:

quote:
Function DecodeVar(FromWhat, DecodeWhat)
    Temp = InStr(1, FromWhat, DecodeWhat & "-eq-", vbTextCompare) + Len(DecodeWhat) + 4
    Temp2 = InStr(Temp, FromWhat, "-+-", vbTextCompare)
    If Temp <= Len(DecodeWhat) + 4 Then
       DecodeVar = ""
    Else
       DecodeVar = Mid(FromWhat, Temp, Temp2 - Temp)
    End If    
End Function

Function EncodeVar(EncodeWhat, AsWhat)
   EncodeVar = AsWhat & "-eq-" & EncodeWhat & "-+-"
End Function

Download Attachment: hal45custommem.uhp
130.88 KB

1108

Ultra Hal 7.0 / how do i uninstall?

« on: February 23, 2003, 04:34:56 pm »

Do not just try deleting Hal's folder, as it utilizing the Microsoft Windows Installer Service which has a "self-healing" function. You must use "Add/Remove Programs" from your Windows Control Panel to properly uninstall the program.

1109

Ultra Hal 7.0 / Is there any difference...

« on: February 23, 2003, 04:31:14 pm »

The brains are identical in every way. Most of the megabytes in the full version of Hal come from the speech recognition engine (40 MB) and all of the additional characters.

1110

Ultra Hal 7.0 / Voices...

« on: February 23, 2003, 04:27:49 pm »

If you want really realistic sounding voices checkout AT&T's Natural Voices demo at http://www.naturalvoices.att.com/demos/

This TTS engine does work with Hal, but it does not contain syncronization information. So it will not work with MSAgent characters, only with Zabaware characters. The AT&T natural voices engine is a huge resource hog. A single voice font takes around 600 MB of space on your computer, and it requires a ton of CPU and memory power, so a top of the line computer is needed to work well with Hal.