Talk:HablarConSara

Tony Anderson has made a very similar Activity and called it BotSpeak. I have been working with him in making a few changes and making a default Nepali Brain for deployment in Nepal.

I want to give you a brief overview of how BotSpeak works

BotSpeak uses pyAiml The GUI is very much similar to that of Speak, with an additional tab on the Activity toolbar called Bot. Under Bot there is a drop down menu with the default set to Speak. In this mode, BotSpeak behaves in the same way as Speak. This we hope will make Speak redundant and shall be eventually replaced Then there is Bill which is a default English bot, also based on ALICE, all though I removed a few aiml's that I found inappropriate and out of context for children. On the same note, I found that the default brain is too large for the XO and hence I removed the aiml's. This made the default Bill work fine on the XO. And then we have Add, which will create a Bot with the name typed in the text area. Given Sugar's Security policy, the aiml is created in /home/olpc/isolation/gid_to_data_dir/*/. there are three files there. bot is a list of Bots to show in the drop down menu. and the other two are the newly created bot's {name}.aiml and {name}-update.aiml The interesting thing of BotSpeak is you can help the Bot learn to answer questions in certain ways. A newly created bot will not have any response to any text entered by the child, so it will say, "I dont know what to say". The user can then type "say: " followed by the answer the student may hear from the bot which will add it to the {name}-update.aiml

During the time of making BotSpeak, the keyboards on the OLPC XO's deployed in Nepal did not have keyboards with Nepali characters printed to the keyboard, and so tony and I decided we would keep a button in the Activity tab that would bring up the an SVG file that would overlap the mouth. We made the SVG such that it gave the shape of an actual XO keyboard with all the characters based on the XO's XKB characters. We kept it help children Touch Type, and were hoping we would slowly integrate it to the Sugar Frame. By now though, the XO's in Nepal have Nepali printed to the keyboard and Touch Typing is better taught by alternative activities like Typing Turtle. We now intend to use that button for a simple help text on botspeak.

If you are interested, you can E-Mail me at avash dot pandit at olenepal dot org and Tony Anderson at tony at olenepal dot org

-- 10:32pm Nepal Standard Time User:Avash