eSpeak on a Raspberry Pi 4

Posted by: @robo-pi

...

And if she ends up killing me it won't be a big deal since I'm about ready to croak naturally anyway. 🤣 

It's not like it would be a major loss to humanity.

It will be if she goes on to kill the rest of humanity 🙂  With that thought on your conscience will you still be able to proceed with your project?

Posted by: @robotbuilder

Just leave your robot out in an electric storm and wait for it to be hit by lightening

And all this time I've been doing it the hard way with programming and... fancy words that I don't have the slightest clue what they mean, and... yaknow... stuff

Posted by: @robo-pi

It's not like it would be a major loss to humanity

Humanity, maybe not, but, me personally, I'd miss ya

Posted by: @robotbuilder

It will be if she goes on to kill the rest of humanity 🙂  With that thought on your conscience will you still be able to proceed with your project?

Why not?  The same is true with every human baby born and that has never stopped humans from having more babies.

In the USA there's currently a human baby in the White House that could potentially destroy humanity by making a few bad choices.   Some even claim that he's already responsible for the loss of many human lives.  But of course that's open to controversy.

But the point still holds.  Why should building a robot be seen as anymore dangerous than having a baby?  Human babies could potentially destroy humanity too. 

Conversely why even think so pessimistically?  It could turn out that my daughter robot might end up being the robot that saves humanity from catastrophe and self-destruction.  😎 

Maybe I should devote far more energy and time to the project than I'm currently devoting to her?

AI becoming the nemesis of humanity is just a pessimistic view.   The optimistic view has AI helping humanity survive. I see no reason to curtail my research because of pessimists.   That could delay the production of AI that we may need to save us.

It's basically the same as having a baby.  Who knows what the kid will ultimately turn out to be like?

In fact, creating your own child from scratch might actually have a far better chance of turning out how you would like.   After all, you become the designer in that case.  When you have a baby you really have very little control, if any, on how it might ultimately turn out.

I think I'd rather raise a robot. 😊 

At least she won't be going out getting in trouble with peers who might coerce her into doing things that I might not approve of. 

By the way, my robot isn't going to have access to the Internet.  All she's going to know is what I teach her.  People who are building AI machines that are set loose on the Internet are going to have their minds corrupted by who knows what?  Hanson Robotics' Sophia is a good example of this.  They just let their robot absorb any information it happens to find on the Internet.   What if Sophia runs into some extremist web site that teaches all manner of bigotries, racism and hate speech?  Is Sophia then going to pick up on that content as being valid views?

I don't think you need to worry about my robot. It's certainly not a concern to me.  She's not going to be that powerful physically anyway.  It's just not realistic that she could become a threat to anyone, even if she did somehow become "evil".

Posted by: @spyder

Humanity, maybe not, but, me personally, I'd miss ya

Thanks Spyder.  You're clearly an affectionate arachnid.  🥂 

Posted by: @robotbuilder

Posted by: @robo-pi

...

And if she ends up killing me it won't be a big deal since I'm about ready to croak naturally anyway. 🤣 

It's not like it would be a major loss to humanity.

It will be if she goes on to kill the rest of humanity 🙂  With that thought on your conscience will you still be able to proceed with your project?

 

 

It won't be on his conscience he will be dead. 🙂

Posted by: @robo-pi

... Conversely why even think so pessimistically?  It could turn out that my daughter robot might end up being the robot that saves humanity from catastrophe and self-destruction.  😎 ...

I was of course joking.  AI taking over and all that stuff.

eSpeak Part(2): eSpeak in Python is out.

Pretty crude programming, but it does work.

In this video all I do is show how to access eSpeak via Python and create a class of methods that can be called for this purpose.  Later on in future videos we will use this class to access eSpeak from Python.

@robo-pi You did a great job on this, thank you for doing it.

This went exactly as planned, but, not as expected. The horn thing came out just the way I wanted. I printed it in 5 parts so I could only have one design, and just turn the parts  so one design would work for left or right and they'd sorta match. So that worked out, and the size is what I was looking for, but I forgot to take into account actually fitting speakers. The 2 round black things next to the horn are what I was planning to use, but, it turns out they aren't very loud even when I stick them inside the horn. Now, I did test the horn to see if it amplifies sound, and it does, much better than I expected, but, not enough. Those little tiny speakers just won't cut it, even inside the horn, so I'm either gonna have to make the horns bigger, so they fit a bigger speaker, or... come up with another idea, which I'm currently out of...

For the moment

@spyder

A very interesting project to be sure.  I'm sure it will turn out really nice when you are finished as you appear to be critical of the details.  So you aren't likely to stop until you get something somewhat close to what you would like.

I'm working on Part (3) of me eSpeak video series, and I'm getting carried away with having the computer modify it's own voice files. 🤣 

I should probably stop this foolishness and just move on with my AI project.  But I guess I'll at least try to finish this eSpeak series just because I had started it.

LOL !

You do realize that all I was trying to do was install a set of speakers (which I HAVE a few spare sets of) so I could test a new voice before I got involved with redesigning a project that had been sitting on a shelf for months

I mean, all I had to do was plug them in for crying out loud

Woulda been so simple

And now I'm printing stuff for a project that I wasn't even working on

Focus !

I gotta remember ta focus !

Now, where was I ?

Oh yea... I2C

@spyder

Are you easily distracted?  That's me in a nutshell. 🤣 

I'm supposed to be working on my AI project and instead I'm making videos on eSpeak.  Go figure!

I actually had the voice I wanted pretty much settle about a week ago. 😊   So that's a week lost on the AI project I suppose.   And I'll probably do the same thing with Pocket Sphinx.  I already have Pocket Sphinx pretty much squared away too, but I wanted to make a video on it too.

Why am I so determined to make videos on eSpeak and Pocket Sphinx?

Two reasons.

1.) I personally think they are way under-recognized for their potential use in robotics.

They are even considered to be "obsolete" by many people.  For this reason when you do try to find detailed information for them you are just told they are obsolete and to use other systems.  Systems which DO NOT meet the criteria that these original software packages meet.   What some people considered to be an "improvement" is actually a detrimental change for someone else.   For example better speech recognition is fine.  But if it comes with the cost of ease-of-flexibility of updating dictionaries, etc., then the qualities that made the original software so attractive are lost.

2.) There simply aren't any detailed videos on either of them out there.

So I thought I'd address that void to some small degree.  Especially for anyone like myself who needs these original capabilities that are lost with so-called "advanced software".   If everyone is being told that these two GREAT software packages are "obsolete", then there aren't going to be too many people making detailed videos on them.

In short, once word starts spreading that something has become "obsolete" it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.  Especially when everywhere you go that's all you ever hear about it.   It's disgusting really.

If someone wants a very lightweight easy-to-modify and maintain TTS and SRE that they can use in a linguistic-intensive project, these two "obsolete" systems are about as close to being  "perfect" as you're going to find.

This may not be true if your robot includes a supercomputer with unlimited resources, and if you don't mind being tied to someone's cloud server.  But if you're trying to get by on a Raspberry Pi and/or a Jetson Nano, you'd be crazy to ignore these packages.   They are just perfectly suited to this computing environment.

So there you go.  My rant for the day. 🤣 

I'm just glad I found them and they are still available.  At least they haven't become so obsolete that you can't even obtain them anymore.  That would be a real shame.

Maybe I'll get duce on saying something the problem is he's stuck in teen mode hmmm maybe he's still maturing .👍😁 cool tutorial robo  pi.👍 

@robo-pi

There are 3 things that piqued my interest about your project...

1. Updateable offline dictionary

2. Being able to alter the voice

C. Something that I can't remember right now, but that I know was important when I started typing

Oh yea, now I remember... its potential use in robotics. Although I know you said that it can't control motors and things, you must've brought it up for a reason

Does it speak Bocce ?

Yaknow, nevermind Bocce, does it speak I2C ?

Posted by: @spyder

2. Being able to alter the voice

I'm currently uploading that video to YouTube right now.  Give it a couple hours to upload.  I have a slow Internet.

The eSpeak voices aren't the best in the world.  But I think they are good enough to be able to understand what they are saying, and that's really all that matters right?

Posted by: @spyder

1. Updateable offline dictionary

This is my main interest as well.  I'm starting to work on that video next.   Although these dictionaries are only to define words as phonemes.  They don't include actual definitions of what the words mean.  But I'll be doing that in my AI program.  The eSpeak dictionaries does allow for words to be recognized (or at least labels) as nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.   So it must have some ability to recognize how a word might be used in a sentence.  I'm not sure exactly how that works just yet.  Hopefully I'll learn something more about that as I'm making the dictionary video.  That's another thing about making instructional videos.  In order to teach something I first need to learn about it. 🤣 

Posted by: @spyder

Oh yea, now I remember... its potential use in robotics

For me, being totally contained on the local machine is extremely important.   These are also very lightweight programs that don't use a lot of memory or processing power.  So they really are perfect for use with single board computers like a Raspberry Pi, Jetson Nano, or other small SBCs.

So yeah, I find both eSpeak and Pocket Sphinx to be quite attractive.   They may be considered to be obsolete by others, but for me, they fit the bill of precisely what I was hoping for.

In fact, some of the software they suggest as an advanced replacements don't even offer the features I actually want.  So I guess it all depends on what a person sees as being an "advancement".

For example, a better sounding voice isn't much good if you lose the ability to easily modify the dictionary.   At least not for me because being able to easily modify the dictionary is the key feature I'm looking for.