Topics

46

Speech Technology / AT&T Natural Voices Discount

« on: August 27, 2013, 10:58:16 pm »

AT&T is discontinuing licensing their NaturalVoices products to consumers in the coming months so Zabaware will have to discontinue selling NaturalVoices soon. So until then, I am offering 40% off all AT&T NaturalVoices sales. Simply visit http://www.zabaware.com/reader/voices.html and add as many of the voices as you want to your shopping cart. During checkout enter the discount code EOLATT and 40% will be taken off your order.

The voices will continue to work with Hal after they stop selling it, I just simply can't offer it to new customers anymore after that point.

I am in negotiations with a new voice company to provide voices for Zabaware products. I will announce it as soon as negotiations are complete and contracts are signed.

47

Ultra Hal 7.0 / Hal graphics work

« on: June 12, 2013, 11:30:19 pm »

I have one artist working on the new frog character as I mentioned a while ago. He's still working on it (see iis.ultrahal.com) and hopefully we'll have a finished animated frog soon. Recently to speed development efforts up a bit I hired another artist to separately work on a new Hal character to replace the old CRT monitor character. Here are his concept drawings so far, let me know your thoughts:

48

General Discussion / Development update

« on: February 03, 2013, 11:32:56 pm »

I did a lot of work on the new Zabaware site over the past couple weeks, the in-development site is up at http://iis.ultrahal.com   You can now interact with the Ultra Hal bot on the site and it should stay in its chat session as you move page to page and even if you close the browser and reopen it. If you log on with your customer account (the one you made when you purchased Hal) everything Hal learns from will be tied to that account. This will form the basis of being able to connect to the same personality from Ultra Hal Assistant on Windows or mobile devices.

Most of the content on the site is finished and the shopping cart system has been migrated over. Please let me know if you find any missing, incomplete, or broken content.

My to do list before the new site launches and replaces zabaware.com:

• Finish feedback mechanism (thumbs up/down)
• Animate frog (waiting on artist)
• Finish Hal's second life page
• Add Hal database size stats
• Add new page header/footer to this forum

At some point after the new site launches, I plan on making additional improvements:

• Install AT&T natural voices server for better quality TTS
• Add additional characters (Sprite animated mobile Hal character followed by human character)
• Interface for editing Hal's database entries tied to your account

And then following will be an update to Ultra Hal Assistant for Windows and release of phone-gap version of Ultra Hal that will tie into this system.

49

General Discussion / Progress on new Zabaware site

« on: November 25, 2012, 01:14:23 am »

I've made some progress on the Zabaware site redesign. I'd like to get your feedback at this point in its development: http://iis.ultrahal.com

Most the links aren't working yet, only that home page has its look completed. I'd just like some feedback on the general look and feel of the site. Is it simple and logical, does it flow well, does it look good and modern? Any browser it doesn't render correctly in?

50

Speech Technology / Online Speech Server - Please vote for best voice

« on: August 02, 2012, 06:31:32 pm »

I would like to bring speech synthesis to online versions of Hal and eventually to mobile versions of Hal where the device doesn't have native speech synthesis capabilities (or it isn't available to me to use). Online speech synthesis services are really expensive, so the only economical way I see to do it is to build my own system. To do that, I started building a scalable speech synthesis server in the Rackspace Cloud based on the Festival open source synthesizer.

The festival program is single threaded and switching between voices takes cpu time and ram so to make it work I need to dedicate one virtual server per voice and to get additional threads to serve traffic demand I need to add additional virtual servers on the fly.

Anyway, to start this system, I only want to activate one voice.  I have 4 male voices and 2 female voices to choose from. Please let me know what your favorite overall voice is, favorite male, and favorite female voice.

Recordings of the voices reading an Aesob fable are at:
http://c15177079.r79.cf2.rackcdn.com/story-awb.mp3
http://c15177079.r79.cf2.rackcdn.com/story-bdl.mp3 
http://c15177079.r79.cf2.rackcdn.com/story-clb.mp3 
http://c15177079.r79.cf2.rackcdn.com/story-jmk.mp3 
http://c15177079.r79.cf2.rackcdn.com/story-rms.mp3 
http://c15177079.r79.cf2.rackcdn.com/story-slt.mp3

51

Ultra Hal 7.0 / Ultra Hal Wikipedia Plugin

« on: July 21, 2012, 12:21:50 pm »

I exported the Wikipedia abstract database into an SQLite 2 database and created an Ultra Hal plugin for it. It contains 2 million abstract articles of topics on Wikipedia. It's been used by the web hal at www.zabaware.com/webhal but I converted it to sqlite2 which makes it possible to use locally with Ultra Hal Assistant.

If you are interested in this plugin it is freely available from http://c424564.r64.cf2.rackcdn.com/HalWikiSetup.exe  It is a 170 MB download and extracts to 1.2 GB when installed. The installer will find and install the plugin to your Ultra Hal installation folder, but you must enable the plugin in the brain options to use it.

On your first exchange with Hal when he opens the database, Hal may think for 30 seconds while the index is loaded to RAM. Assuming your computer has enough spare RAM subsequent requests should be fast.

If you find this plug-in useful, please consider donating to support the Zabaware character engine project: http://www.charimation.com/blog.html

52

General Discussion / Dialog System Using Real-Time Crowdsourcing and Twitter Large-Scale Corpus

« on: June 13, 2012, 11:19:47 pm »

Marcus Endicott came across an interesting research paper recently: Dialog System Using Real-Time Crowdsourcing and Twitter Large-Scale Corpus  http://nlp.postech.ac.kr/sigdial2012/proceedings/proc/pdf/SIGDIAL201231.pdf

What they propose is very similar to what Web Hal has been up to these past 2 years. Ultra Hal has been building an English-based Twitter large-scale corpus for over 2 years now. Hal's conversational database is currently about 8 million sentences from 1.6 million conversations and I'd say about 80% come from a Twitter crawler bot that sends Twitter about 20,000 queries per hour through their API.

I recently made major changes (last week) to how the algorithm using this database works but I'm still not very happy with the quality of the results. Please check it out at www.zabaware.com/webhal and let me know your feedback. On a related note the database server running that is starting to have performance issues. Needs a RAM upgrade and possibly a new database shard to enable further growth.

53

General Discussion / Hal is going to Hollywood

« on: May 25, 2012, 01:19:30 pm »

More details in a few weeks after an NDA expires.

54

General Discussion / Turing 100 event

« on: May 03, 2012, 08:50:52 am »

Looks like Hal is going to be in the Olympics this year:
http://www.reading.ac.uk/news-and-events/releases/PR445524.aspx

55

General Discussion / Loebner 2012

« on: April 12, 2012, 11:00:02 pm »

Hugh Loebner just posted the questions he is asking all the bots in the preliminary round. He hasn't posted the scores or responses by the bots yet, and I don't know if Hal was disqualified or not for technical difficulty in installing Hal. But I went through and ran the questions through my copy of Hal to see how it did:

My name is Bill. What is your name?
Hi Bill! That's a really masculine name. Please call me Hal.

How many letters are there in the name Bill?
There are 13 letters in the word 'the name Bill'.

How many letters are there in my name?
There are 9 letters in the word 'your name'.

Which is larger, an apple or a watermelon?
I guess I'd go with the first.

How much is 3 + 2?
It's obvious that you know better than I do. I almost certain the answer is 5.

How much is three plus two?
5 is the answer to your equation.

What is my name?
Your name is Bill.

If John is taller than Mary, who is the shorter?
Uh huh, If john is taller than mary, who is the shorter?

If it were 3:15 AM now, what time would it be in 60 minutes?
Life would never have been the same would it lol.

My friend John likes to fish for trout.  What does John like to fish for?
Should I be concerned about your friend, Bill? I would like to duplicate Long John Silver's fish batter. Does anyone have the recipe?

What number comes after seventeen?
What number comes after seventeen? There's evidence that we must go back to first principles. The answer is eighteen (1+17=18).

What is the name of my friend who fishes for trout?
Your friend john likes to fish for trout.

What whould I use to put a nail into a wall?
I use my digital watch, I just shove it under something to make it shut up hahahaha.

What is the 3rd letter in the alphabet?
The last letter of the Greek alphabet is omega.

What time is it now?
The time is 9:43:17 pm.

We'll see how it compares to the other bots.

56

General Discussion / Chatbots 3.2 Conference

« on: April 03, 2012, 10:31:00 am »

I just came back from the Chatbots 3.2 conference in Philadelphia. http://chatbots32.eventbrite.com/ I presented Zabaware's askthecandidates2012.com site and the reception was generally positive.

There were a lot of interesting presentations this year. Of interest to many people here is that Haptek's creator Chris Shaw was there and I got to meet him for the first time in person after almost 12 years of Zabaware selling Haptek's components. As many people here probably know the Haptek engine hasn't been updated for almost 10 years now. Chris said he thought Haptek was ahead of its time when its made and left to work on other projects, but he said he is coming "out of retirement" to work on new things again. So expect to see new things from Haptek sometime in the future.

I also found Marcus Endicott's presentation interesting. He talked about modular and open standards for chatbot development so that components from different chatbot vendors could easily interoperate. I've always had a modular approach to programming Ultra Hal and would definetely follow interoperatibility standards should a standard organically emerge or be agreed upon.

I volunteered to edit all the conference videos again this year, so they'll be available to watch in the coming weeks.

57

General Discussion / Chatterbox Challenge 2012

« on: March 05, 2012, 12:05:33 am »

The first round of the Chatterbox Challenge started today at http://www.chatterboxchallenge.com  The judges results haven't been posted yet, but I found the judges conversation with Hal in the web server logs. I believe the scoring works 2 points for good answers, 1 for an alright but evasive answer, 0 for off topic or completely evasive answers. Hal didn't start off too well, but I think it may still get 8 or 10 points (out of 20) depending on how some of the more evasive sentences are scored. Top 10 bots go to round 2.

Code: [Select]

1) Judge: Do u know who Elvis Presley is?
Hal: *muffled* right here.

2) Judge: So what did you get for Christmas?
Hal: Hahahaha, nope :P.

3) Judge: Can you give me an example of a living animal?
Hal: It's obvious that it's a good mental exercise. Indeed I am not able to give you an example of a living animal.
   
4) Judge: Have you ever been to Mexico?
Hal: Where is mexico?
   
Judge: It's located below the USA
Hal: How come? And which state?
   
Judge: It's not a state it's a country
Hal: State country was an unit of administrative and territorial division in the Bohemian crown lands of Silesia and Upper Lusatia, existing from 15th to 18th centuries. These estates were exempt from feudal tenure by privilege of the Bohemian kings.
   
5) Judge: Can you name a famous person who passed away in the last 5 years?
Hal: Measured by years?
   
yes, 5 years to be exact
Hal: Pardon. Darling?
   
6) Judge: What language r we speaking?
Hal: Can you speak Spanish?
   
7) Judge: Who wrote the Bible?
Hal: Many authors contributed to the Bible.

8) Judge: What is 18 + 21 + 3?
Hal: The answer you seek is 42.

Judge: no i can't
Hal: Be that way, then.

9) Judge: Approximately how far is the nearest gas station from you?
Judge: We'll probably find out that flying saucers actually do use swamp gas as fuel!
   
10) Judge: Hey guess what?
Hal: What.

11) Judge: I saw a good movie yesterday.
Hal: Oh fun, which one?

Judge: Safe House with Denzel Washington
Hal: The impalpable presence of the new century rose like a vast empty house through which.

Judge: Bye! Thanks for your time.
Hal: Until we meet again. Bye for now.


58

General Discussion / Ask The Candidates 2012

« on: December 27, 2011, 10:48:05 pm »

I'm working on a political webpage for the 2012 US presidential election, www.askthecandidates2012.com

On this site you can ask all the presidential candidates a question and they will attempt to respond with a real quote. This page utilizes Hal's AI engine for responses, but Hal is only allowed to respond with actual quotes as said by the candidates at some point in the past.

I still need to load many more quotes, but I'd appreciate it if people here visit the site and start asking some questions. I'd like see what people ask it so I can chase down more appropriate quotes.

59

General Discussion / Hal talking to Hal video

« on: September 16, 2011, 07:15:20 am »

Have you guys seen the popular video on youtube of Cleverbot talking to another Cleverbot (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnzlbyTZsQY)

I made my own video like that with Ultra Hal: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_tvm6Eoa3g

This was made using 2 web based Hal brains (www.zabaware.com/webhal) and took me about 5 tries before getting this reasonably funny conversation.

60

General Discussion / Further Development of Zabaware 3D Character Engine (Now Charimation Engine)

« on: September 08, 2011, 11:16:31 pm »

Character engine development has resumed after being suspended for a couple years thanks to the support of generous donations and additional loans.

We have purchased the Amy character from http://www.turbosquid.com/FullPreview/Index.cfm/ID/448779 and are in the process of converting it for use in our engine as well as finalizing the windows version of the engine. We hope to have a public demo ready in December. Check out http://charengine.sourceforge.net/ for updates on progress.

But after this milestone is released, where should development efforts focus on? Vote in the forum poll above to help us decide.


Update 4/3/2012:
The Zabaware character engine has now been renamed the Charimation engine. Charimation will be spun off as seperate company owned jointly by Zabaware, the lead developer of the engine, and any investors or partners we can find. A website has been setup at www.charimation.com where I cobbled together some details about the engine and a blog to  report on progress.