
Show HN: Watch and hear macOS robots argue live in your terminal - christophem
https://github.com/christophemarois/arguing-robots
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p4bl0
I don't understand the point of this. Is there a cultural reference that I'm
missing? At first I thought that it was AI robots talking to each other but it
is actually a dead simple script which reads a text file and pass it to a
text-to-speech command. So clearly it does not interest HN for the technical
aspect. I feel I'm missing something.

~~~
sunilkumarc
Even I thought it was something related to AI. But looks like it is just a
simple text to speech utility.

~~~
p4bl0
It _uses_ a text-to-speech utility, it is not even implementing that.

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otterpro
I had to do a double-take on the source code, as it looked just like Ruby.
It's the first Crystal code ([https://crystal-lang.org/](https://crystal-
lang.org/)) I've ever seen, and the interesting part is that it compiles Ruby-
like code into executable. Anyway, the code can be summed up as
"Process.run("say -v #{voice} \"#{text}\"", shell: true)", in which it calls
"say" command to speak the voice of text file in macOS terminal.

PS: Does anybody know if the goal of Crystal is to be like Go, and if there's
any performance advantage using Crystal, compared to MRI?

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OliverJones
Oh, yeah. Back to the future.

Does anybody besides me remember the psychoanalyze-pinhead feature in
venerable versions of Emacs?

There was a script that offered a parody of Rogerian psychotherapy. For
example, you could type, "I'm anxious" into it, and it would respond "Do you
feel anxious because of something that happened in your childhood."

And there was a script that blurted random Zippy-the-pinhead quotes, like

"Are we having fun yet? Are we? Are we?"

"Life is a blur of Republicans and meat."

The psychoanalyze-pinhead script connected these two together. So you'd get
stuff like

"Tell me more about a blur of Republicans and meat and your mother."

Emacs was pretty fast. You could get a few hundred kb of absurdity in a few
seconds.

~~~
tangue
Emacs Doctor ( which was a version of Eliza [0]) is actually more
sophisticated than this script.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA)

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firefoxd
Maybe i don't know the reference. Anyone care to clarify?

~~~
Kiro
What do you mean? I think it's pretty clear what this is. Two bots talking to
each other. Like two Alexas/Google Home listening and responding in a never-
ending conversation.

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tomeglenn
You clearly didn't actually look at the link at all. It is just a script that
reads a text file and outputs it using a text-to-speech library...

~~~
Kiro
You're right and I made a fool of myself. I thought it was like seebotschat on
Twitch which was actually two real bots talking to each other (and amazing
that is).

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Kiro
If it's half as awesome as twitch.tv/seebotschat was it's amazing.

~~~
OJFord
I don't know anything about that Twitch link, but I doubt it. This one being a
disingenuous use of the word 'robots'.

Everybody that's upvoted on HN or starred on Github (over 30 on each!) has
clearly not followed and read the link.

It appears to me like OP's experiment in marketing - getting HN readers to
react positively to something mundane.

~~~
Kiro
Well, ok. The Twitch thing was actually two bots talking to each other (two
Google Homes hooked up to Cleverbot or a fork). It resulted in some really
hilarious and sometimes deep conversations. I watched for hours.

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trqx
care to share an audio sample for those of us not owning an apple machine?

I'm curious about Navi's voice.

~~~
khedoros1
Look up Serial Experiments Lain on Youtube. If I remember correctly, it uses
the "Whisper" voice that they're referring to when it announces the episode
name.

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trqx
eh, I thought the project created a new voice based on navi. I didn't know
that serial experiment lain used a MacOS voice. Here it is:
[https://youtu.be/Z4hqUxb9MmY?t=3m11s](https://youtu.be/Z4hqUxb9MmY?t=3m11s)

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andyfleming
Thanks for sharing!

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anthk
Meh, I've done better stuff with Hailo from CPAN and 20 lines of Perl.

~~~
dang
Please don't post snarky dismissals of other people's work on HN. That's
especially against the rules of Show HN threads:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

Edit: you've repeatedly posted uncivil comments to HN. We ban accounts that do
that, so please stop doing that.

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macscam
This seems important

~~~
christophem
It's the opposite of important, thus it might be

