Bloc d’en RainCT

Today I’ve discovered about the existence of the Ubiquity project, but no, not Ubuntu’s installer - this Ubiquity, from Mozilla Labs, is a really curious plugin for Firefox.

Ubiquity allows you to execute web related actions by writing commands with a natural syntax, in a way somewhat similar to Gnome Do. I’m not going to show any example because I can’t find a good way to explain all of it’s potential, other than “try it yourself” (ah, and pointing to the video here).

You like it? Great; here is some good news for those of you involved with new applications packaging: Thanks to the efforts of Olivier Girardot and Jonathan Winandy there is now a “revu” command which will show you the last comment for any package and open its details page in a new tab if you press [return]. And for those who want to be notified of new comments instead of hunting them down, I remember that there are also personal/package feeds available since a while.

Have you ever dreamed about controlling your PC with voice commands? Well, now you can (though only some specific actions)!

What do I need?
- A computer with Ubuntu (you can still do the same on other distributions, but this post won’t cover that).
- A microphone (a cheap one will do).
- Some application(s) which you want to control and which can be used with commands on the terminal.

Installation
Go over to my PPA and install packages julius and julius-voxforge from there.

Writing the command and control application
Follow the instructions from /usr/share/doc/julius-voxforge/examples/README to create your own grammar, and then edit the command.py file to suit your needs (the simplest configuration would be to just edit the dictionary near line 60). Finally, to execute it: julius -quiet -input mic -C julian.jconf 2>/dev/null | ./command.py

Problems
I don’t really have much experience with Julius, but if you have problems with the instructions explained here leave a comment or ping me on IRC (RainCT@Freenode) and I’ll try to help you. But first look at the examples below to ensure that you’ve done everything right :).

More?
I’m currently working at further improving those packages and getting them into Ubuntu. Also, I may write another post in the future explaining how to create your own speech corpora and acoustic models, but I can’t promise anything.

Example on how to control Rhythmbox:

. example.voca:
% NS_B
<s> sil

% NS_E
</s> sil

% ID
DO d uw
COMP k ax m p

% COMMAND
PLAY p l ey
NEXT n eh k s t
PREV p r iy v
SHOW sh ow
UP ah p
DOWN d aw n
SILENCE s ay l ax n s

. sample.grammar
S: NS_B ID COMMAND NS_E

. command.py’s parse function (note: Wordpress breaks the indentation)
def parse(line):
params = [param.lower() for param in line.split() if param]
commands = {
'play': 'rhythmbox-client --play',
'silence': 'rhythmbox-client --pause',
'next': 'rhythmbox-client --next',
'prev': 'rhythmbox-client --previous',
'show': 'rhythmbox-client --notify',
'up': 'rhythmbox-client --volume-up',
'down': 'rhythmbox-client --volume-down',
}
if params[1] in commands: os.popen(commands[params[1]])

. Usage: (Action - Verbal command)
Reproduce - DO PLAY
Pause - DO SILENCE (I didn’t use “DO PAUSE” because like that it had a very high error rate)
Next song - DO NEXT
Previous song - DO PREV (”DO PREVIOUS” can’t be used because VoxForge’s acoustic models don’t support some of it’s phonemes)
Show the name of the current song - DO SHOW
Increment Rhythmbox’s volume - DO UP
Decrement Rhythmbox’s volume - DO DOWN

Random tip:
You can let the computer answer to your commands using either espeak “text to say” or, if you have Festival (which sounds more natural) installed, festival -b ‘(SayText “text to say”)’.

Happy hacking!

Hey,

Okay, I know this is not a forum, but I wanted to ask for recommendations about what’s the best way handle internationalization of XML documents (of the content in it, of course, not the tags themselves). More details about why I’m asking this will come later :).

Thanks.

Més val que tinguis el matí del dia 5 lliure, perquè sinó et perdràs les activitats estel·lars de l’equip d’Ubuntu català: taller de GIMP, Ubuntu Studio, Freevial i Frets on Fire!

Aquest dissabte, a l’UPF; t’hi esperem! Inscripció gratuïta aquí.

… call gtk.gdk.threads_init() when you want to work with threads in a PyGTK application.

Well, to not leave this post so short, I’ll also refer a post explaning threads on PyGTK which looks quite good (I didn’t look carefuly at it because I already knew 99% of what it says… it’s a pity that because of that I didn’t notice the 1% that I didn’t know and which would have saved me one hour of debugging :/). Also, note that if you write your own __init__ function in order to pass data to the thread you will have to call threading.Thread.__init__(self) somewhere in it.