Conversation design
Embodied conversations: Beaples Barton
Goal
- To learn how to set up an end-to-end voice pipeline: from speech recognition to speech synthesis.
- Learn about conversation design for embodied interfaces: not only copywriting, but designing the mouth and eye movements as well.
- Familiarize myself with Microsoft Azure Speech services and the Picoh bot open source ecosystem.
Beaple’s dialog is completely rule-based. By creating smart responses that are basically context-free with just one or two keywords, Beaples seems to be following my lead.
What fascinated me, is what a difference it makes to design for an actual face with eyes. Beaples’ personality seemed to simply emerge! Even to the extent that it was very clear that he should speak English.
Time spent
Most of my 2 days that I spent on this project went into technical research and getting things up and working. The small dialog with Beaples emerged as we went, and took me about 30 minutes. I plan to extend and document the flows in the future.