Friday, May 23, 2008

Tux droid

Spent a good portion of the afternoon playing with my new Tux Droid. Downloaded the source. Started to learn some more about how D-BUS works. Played with the Festival Text to Speech Engine.

I was all excited since I got it to talk with the open source text to speech, and when I spoke to Victoria tonight, I held the phone up next to the Penguin so she could hear it talk:
Hello Devin. My name is Tux. What is your name?
I was so proud that I had gotten it to work. Her reply:
Why is it asking what your name is when it just said "Hello Devin"?
And that is why she is the Doctoral student and I am the college dropout.

Also, I was originally a bit disappointed that the audio quality was so poor. However, the problem with the audio was just a result of where I happened to put the Penguin on my desk to try it out.

It's kind of obvious after the fact, but it's generally a bad idea to put a 2.4 GHz wireless device with realtime delivery requirements within six inches of an 802.11g wireless router.