blog.lorneswork.com

Ideally The Conversation Piece (which I will hereby mercifully shorten to “Convopi”) would run some tiny flavor of Linux – just enough to get the job done. It would also run entirely on Open Source, BSD-licensed technology. Realistically though, we have a prototype due Nov. 20th, and I need to cut corners.

And so, as it stands Microsoft would make a killing from licenses if this product ever hit the market. We’re running Windows XP, a copy of Office 2003 (yes, just for the speech recognition engine), and .NET 3.0. I was considering Vista which has a speech recognition engine built-in, but the laptop has “only” 256MB of RAM. Vista demands 512MB before it will install. Now, that’s some serious tom foolery!

The one thing I can say about using .NET / Visual Studio 2005 is that it sure makes life easy. With its plentiful libraries and tools, it can do in 100 lines what many platforms would in 1000. Even more impressive, the learning curve lasted about 10 minutes. I swear I could train a monkey could do this. I feel a little guilty (okay, a lot guilty), but I suppose this is really the future. Software is becoming too complex for anyone to write from the bottom up.

The technical challenges in making The Conversation Piece a reality are enormous. On the hardware side, it needs to be small, powerful, and attractive – things computers generally, well, aren’t.

On the software side, it’s even more miserable: speech recognition, text-to-speech, internet connectivity, and some kind of yet-to-be-invented “topic-jisting” AI. Worse than all that though, it’s got to be dead simple. No setup, no updates, no GUI, and definitely no BSOD – “grandma” (god bless her) has never even heard of it, and I want to keep it that way.

The project is already well underway so thankfully most of these problems have a solution. The hardware for the prototype will be an old laptop donated by teammate Tanya. I pulled it apart a few weeks ago, and found myself with this unholy creation:

Tanya and Nate will be figuring out how to mount that into a picture frame, while I concentrate on the software. More to come on that.

This semester I’m taking IAT 400. It’s a project course where students, “work in teams to develop an artistic or product-based design addressing a complex problem”. My team is working on a digital-picture-frame-like device we’re calling “The Conversation Piece”. Using speech recognition technology, it will eavesdrop on ones conversation, and then display relevant images from a photo-sharing site like Flickr.

One would put this product in a living room, waiting room, or any space where people tend to congregate and chat. As they do, The Conversation Piece will illustrate their dialog, enhancing the conversation and perhaps taking the discussion in new and interesting directions. At the very least, it should give people something to talk about besides the weather.

In another mode, The Conversation Piece will act like a regular digital picture frame, showing photos from ones own Flickr account. This will also make use of the speech interface though for quick and easy navigation. For instance a command like, “Show Lorne” would show pictures from my Flickr account tagged with “Lorne”. The command, “Show Lorne hiking” would show pictures tagged with both “Lorne” and “Hiking”. In this way the product should be simple to use, even for “Grandma” who has little or no computer experience.