Ok, so we've been mega slack with our timeline here. I'm not even sure if we've got a final idea decided upon yet.
From what I gathered at the last meeting, everyone was pretty happy with the “chinese proverb” thinggy that was talked about. So I've sat down and tried to map it out a little better. From what I could see, there were two ways for us to approach this. I've broken both possibilties into what I call "Oracle 1" and "Oracle 2". Before I get to that though, I looked at breaking the idea down a little more.
Chinese Proverb Oracle -
What does it do ?
Gives advice based on key words spoken by participants
Where does it get the advice from ?
Manual Prompts / stored data, or ambient recordings
How does it display the advice ?
Text to Speech, or Combination of pre-recorded vocal samples, or a combination of the two
That's what I felt was the "Oracle" in its simplest form. Going from that, I thought it could be split into two parts. "Oracle 1" , and "Oracle 2".
Oracle 1 -
Provides inspiration advice based on ambient recordings from around the space
REQUIRES:
- Voice Recognition
- Analysing of vocal data
- More Specifically, Understanding what has been said
- Vocal Dictionary
- Dynamic Sentence Construction.
Oracle 2 -
Inspiration advice provided via specific user interaction
REQUIRES:
- Storing Answers to Specific Quesions ( Keywords )
- Voice ( Keyword ) Recognition
- Dynamic Sentence Construction.
- Question / Answer Storage
From this point, I thought about Oracles throughout history, and the tradition / mystery behind them. They predict the future - good or bad. Though the predictions are usually vague. And that made me think of those ancient chinese proverbs you here all the time. such as
"An ant may well destroy a whole dam"
or
"Crows everywhere are equally black"
Incredibly cryptic stuff like that. And that got me thinking of those automatic cryptic proverb generators you see on the net these days. It was at this point I got myself all confused and decided to break the whole project down again.
I drew a diagram, but my scanner is dead, and the drawing is rubbish - so I'll just do my best to describe it here. I thought, what is the most fundamental element of this project, it Gives Advice. So then I thought, how does it know what advice to give? it's Based on a keyword or phrase. Which makes sense. Then I had to think where these keywords / phrases were stored, and taken apart. There's a possible two options. They're Randomly Aquired and Generated, or they're Pre-Defined Responses ( user submitted ). The Randomly Aquired elements would be taken from Microphones submitted around the environment. but how to distinguish what's what? Does Placement Dictate the data that is being recorded? or will it purely be a collection of words. In which case, does it need to understand the context of the words at all ? or merely just the words themselves. As for the pre-defined responses, we have to wonder how we can garuntee that users will submit responses. I considered some sort of Offering system. You Offer an answer to a question, or a word to the "oracle" and it will then grant you an answer to your question.
From there, I had to consider *how* this information would be presented to the user. Via Proverbs seemed like a good idea. Randomly generated proverbs based on the recorded vocabulary of the system. Though then, would they be Played Back as the actual recorded voices? or would they use a Text to Speech ( TTS ) system, or Both?
And then, what about a visual response as well ? A wishing well, with the proverb written beneath the surface ? or merely auditory. A hole in the wall, a whisper on the wind, multiple voices all replying at once. The three fates giving a little bit of a hint to the questioning mortal.
And that's what I sat down and thought about.
Group, I need your feedback. We're way behind on this one, so yes - we've got to get all this sorted tonight, but more likely, tommorrow. So we can get this assignment written, and organised.
Sorry if this was just a big long rant, it's taken from a bunch of a4 pages of notes I threw together roughly. But it seems to shed a bit of light on the situation, at least, on what I feel the project is about. What do you people think ?
- Anthony
I drew a diagram, but my scanner is dead, and the drawing is rubbish - so I'll just do my best to describe it here. I thought, what is the most fundamental element of this project, it Gives Advice. So then I thought, how does it know what advice to give? it's Based on a keyword or phrase. Which makes sense. Then I had to think where these keywords / phrases were stored, and taken apart. There's a possible two options. They're Randomly Aquired and Generated, or they're Pre-Defined Responses ( user submitted ). The Randomly Aquired elements would be taken from Microphones submitted around the environment. but how to distinguish what's what? Does Placement Dictate the data that is being recorded? or will it purely be a collection of words. In which case, does it need to understand the context of the words at all ? or merely just the words themselves. As for the pre-defined responses, we have to wonder how we can garuntee that users will submit responses. I considered some sort of Offering system. You Offer an answer to a question, or a word to the "oracle" and it will then grant you an answer to your question.
From there, I had to consider *how* this information would be presented to the user. Via Proverbs seemed like a good idea. Randomly generated proverbs based on the recorded vocabulary of the system. Though then, would they be Played Back as the actual recorded voices? or would they use a Text to Speech ( TTS ) system, or Both?
And then, what about a visual response as well ? A wishing well, with the proverb written beneath the surface ? or merely auditory. A hole in the wall, a whisper on the wind, multiple voices all replying at once. The three fates giving a little bit of a hint to the questioning mortal.
And that's what I sat down and thought about.
Group, I need your feedback. We're way behind on this one, so yes - we've got to get all this sorted tonight, but more likely, tommorrow. So we can get this assignment written, and organised.
Sorry if this was just a big long rant, it's taken from a bunch of a4 pages of notes I threw together roughly. But it seems to shed a bit of light on the situation, at least, on what I feel the project is about. What do you people think ?
- Anthony
1 comment:
You have come up with great ideas and starting points there. At the moment I don't have any more to add, we can talk about it later today.
Not having the internet at home is really hard! I need a scholarship or just free money!
Also... I havent had a reply about recording in the library.
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