
Stephanie, open-source virtual assistant built to control and automate tasks - PleaseHelpMe
https://slapbot.github.io/
======
nathanasmith
For anyone else on Linux that gets the error:

Default Audio Player for mp3 files is not set up, like vlc or something.

when you try to run it, note that Stephanie depends on the python module
os.startfile[0] which apparently is a Windows only thing that works like xdg-
open. I'm not a python expert but here's what I did: the offending file is
stephanie-va-master/Stephanie/TextManager/speaker.py. If you edit line 15
which is:

os.startfile(self.speak_result)

and change it to:

os.system("xdg-open " \+ self.speak_result)

everything works. Somebody else more knowledgeable can probably suggest
something better.

[0][https://docs.python.org/3.6/library/os.html#os.startfile](https://docs.python.org/3.6/library/os.html#os.startfile)

Edit: Fixed! They fixed it by wrapping that line in an if statement checking
the output of sys.platform. Very responsive dev.

------
Dunedan
The website is a way better source than the Github repo:
[https://slapbot.github.io/](https://slapbot.github.io/)

~~~
acidburnNSA
It looks great. Started watching the pitch video...somebody get that guy a
decent microphone!!

~~~
markatkinson
I came here to 2nd this!

------
microcolonel
There are lots of projects like this today; but I think the most important and
useful thing (profoundly missing) is an open source state-of-art offline (or
maybe hybrid) speech recognition package. Until that happens, almost nothing
has changed.

------
_jtrig
This is exactly the kind of IoT I was hoping for. Not the bastardized
corporate data-mining kind.

Hope this project keeps growing!

~~~
whyagaindavid
It uses speech to text from Google/MS/Facebook/IBM/SoundCloud with your API
key

[https://slapbot.github.io/documentation/configuration/](https://slapbot.github.io/documentation/configuration/)

~~~
crawfordcomeaux
I wonder how easy it'd be to add support for Sphinx via Python's
SpeechRecognition package...

------
GordonS
> or just write your own modules to extend the functionality of the
> application using simple as f __* guide.

I'm not one to be a prude... but, is this really necessary?

------
partycoder
I would recommend re-recording the video with a better audio setup, including
a good mic or try to process the audio somehow. It's a bit difficult to hear.

------
theprop
Cool! Any video demo or anything of this anywhere?

~~~
PleaseHelpMe
This may be helpful to you :
[https://youtu.be/Pp5dXbWZsrU?t=1m40s](https://youtu.be/Pp5dXbWZsrU?t=1m40s)

------
kevintb
I'm sure this is a great project, but for once, it would be wonderful if
Virtual Assistants weren't named after women.

~~~
nathanasmith
We've already hashed this out in these very comments. If you'd read before
posting, you'd see the premise was investigated by looking at the current crop
of virtual assistants on the play store and found to be false.

~~~
mort96
Firstly, there's no requirement to read other unrelated threads before
commenting in this thread.

Secondly, what's more relevant: Siri, Cortana, and Alexa, or random assistants
on the Play store? (I'm ignoring Google Assistant, as that's named after a
company, not a male or female).

To be clear, I don't think it matters whether assistants are named after males
or females, I just thought your comment was needlessly dismissive. Had you
provided a link to the other hacker news thread[s] and not been as aggressive,
your comment would have had much more value.

~~~
nathanasmith
>Firstly, there's no requirement to read other unrelated threads before
commenting in this thread.

The guy started a new thread on the exact same issue that had already been
discussed completely with insightful posts on both sides in another thread
containing exactly 32 comments which was more than half the total comments on
the article at the time he posted. Starting a new thread when over 50 percent
of the comments were on this exact subject was absolutely unnecessary and
frankly tiresome. And you claim that is "unrelated". How exactly do you get
that?

>Secondly, what's more relevant: Siri, Cortana, and Alexa, or random
assistants on the Play store?

The latter are more relevant as this is an assistant written by some guy by
himself in Python. Furthermore, in the settings for this one, you can name it
whatever you want. Additionally, note how Siri defaults to male or female
depending on the market. Specifically, in the UK, it is male out of the box.

>I'm ignoring Google Assistant

Hmm..

>I just thought your comment was needlessly dismissive. Had you provided a
link to the other hacker news thread[s] and not been as aggressive, your
comment would have had much more value.

Provide a link? Use your eyes. The comments are inches away on this exact
page.

The bottom line is, this issue was talked about thoroughly, yet it keeps being
brought up, derailing the comments, instead of actually discussing the topic
at hand which is the app the guy wrote. This kind of thing makes Hacker News
less useful and that is a worse problem than my purported "dismissiveness"
over something that shouldn't exist in the first place.

------
Animats
Nice. Anyone interested in porting this to Android to replace Google voice-
driven services? F-Droid needs this.

~~~
whyagaindavid
[https://slapbot.github.io/documentation/configuration/](https://slapbot.github.io/documentation/configuration/)

Sadly not possible with fdroid if it has api keys from proprietary services.

~~~
Animats
Oh, I though it did speech to text itself. It just calls one of several
commercial speech to text engines run by Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc.

Could CMUSphinx be used? That's open source speech recognition that can fit in
a phone if you keep the vocabulary size down.

------
Pfhreak
Someday, someone will buck the trend of naming their voice assistant with a
woman's name. Sadly, today is not that day.

~~~
nerdponx
To be fair, Siri is androgynous enough and could be given a man's voice by
default.

~~~
peteretep
I gave Siri a male voice right out of the bag, and keep forgetting other
people have female Siris. Having Butler Siri feels classy...

------
wcummings
Slapbot?

------
notgood
How many times have you complained about 99% of soldiers being male? Let me
guess, none. Or 75% of suicides being males? Let me guess, none too. Now, how
many times you have complained about the gender of artificial computer voices
like you just did? many times right? Not only you give this kind of inane
issues any relevance whatsoever, you give none to any actual form of equality
and pretend us to take it seriously.

~~~
dang
Please don't take HN threads on this sort of ideological tangent. The original
point was at least partly on topic; this is way off in the flames.

We detached this subthread from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14530866](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14530866)
and marked it off-topic.

~~~
backpropaganda
I don't approve of this decision. If discussion about how AI assistants have
female names are on-topic, then so is the rebuttal that "AI assistants having
female names is a non-issue". I like you, dang, but I think you added your own
ideological bias in making this decision.

~~~
dang
I know you guys often see ideological bias in these things, but there's a
strong if not irresistible tendency to see that whether it's happening or not
[1,2], and people of opposite ideological persuasions accuse us of the same
thing. So I dunno. I can't judge my own bias, obviously. What I can tell you
is that after dealing with thousands of these, the only thing I consciously
care about is what makes the threads tedious and predictable vs. not. That's
pretty much the only thing that HN is ultimately about, and I probably have a
more fine-tuned sense of it (i.e. of what's predictable) than most people do,
just because of the effects of brute quantity on the brain.

1\.
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20cognitive%20bias&sor...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20cognitive%20bias&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment)

2\.
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20beholder&sort=byDate...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20beholder&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment)

~~~
backpropaganda
You know best, of course. Note that I'm not claiming that HN is too
left-/right-wing for me. I think HN is pretty well balanced and centrist. What
I'm saying is you might have erred on the side of avoiding controversy. HN
could use _more_ controversial comments, whether it comes from the left or the
right, especially when the comment is not trolling and is informative.

