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Act Like A Real Star Trek Captain: Talk
Snaller writes: "Partnering up with Game Commander developers Mindmaker, Interplay is promising the world that when their space sim Star Trek: Klingon Academy is released, Trekker happy players will be able to order the crews around simply by speaking to the game - the press release does not specify if it has to be in Klingonese." And if Loki ports it, perhaps they will also come up with a robust, generalized voice recognition system for Linux! :)
- Rip off shirt command (Only valid in fight scenes)
- I'm a doctor not a (non-doctor occupation)
- You get to talk your computer into self-destructing
- Find the number 47 sub-plot
cthread. cthread_fork(). Fork, thread, fork!
I expect this technology to be integrated into keyboards and/or monitors over the next few years. Maybe into phones. Probably into car phones.
No!
I said WARP SPEED!
Not GIVE WORF SPEED!
Someone get that crazy Klingon under controll!
Actually, there is one, and it is open source. It's called Sphinx from Carnegie Mellon University, and it's on Sourceforge.
You know what to do with the HELLO.
You know what to do with the HELLO. ...
Help create an open-source world
Me: Helmsman! Why.... don't.... you respond to my orders? I'm... talking.... just like.... the greatest captain of all! I am... Captain Kirk!
Computer: Command not understood. Incoming torpedo.
Me: Damn you, computer! Evasive action!
Computer: Initiating evasive pattern Delta. Incoming torpedo has missed.
Me: Hailing frequencies open! Khan, You managed to kill everyone else, but like a poor marksman, you keep missing the target. You... keep... missing... the target.
Computer: Command not understood. Deleting files.
Me: Khaaaaaaaaaann!
I'd rather not talk to my computer, really.
First of all, you can't just talk to the computer and expect it to know what you're saying. You have to spend time teaching the computer your voice and accent. If you voice ever changes, like you go through puberty or get a cold, then it won't recognize your voice any more.
Likewise, anyone else who wants to talk to the computer has to create a different profile. Say your girlfriend, roommate, or whoever wants to play Klingon Academy, too. Well, I hope that the game takes that into account, or else it will erase your voice setup. I always hated that MS DOS games were single user, in the sense that my dad and I couldn't play the same game with different save game directories. We had to install the game twice, once for him and once for me, which used up massive amounts of disk space.
Also, there are linguistic problems, like the stupid Trek tagline, "Worf, fire at will." How will the game treat that situation? Will Worf shoot Riker? Obviously, this isn't a circumstance that will happen, but the English language is really rather complicated and difficult to understand when spoken aloud. When written, grammar mostly allows us to understand what is meant.
Well, that's my pessimistic, cynical rant for today.
and say "File...Exit...Yes"
"Do you think we could wipe out world hunger forever if scientists figured out how to make AOL's Free CD's edible?"-
I've seen the Game Commander in action last year, but with MechWarrior II or III (sorry, I'm no gaming buff). It certainly looked cool, the way the guy controlled the Mech by joystick, but used voice commands to handle targetting, speed, weapon selection, firing... Especially since the computer talked back a little too (eg. "Acquire target !" - "Target locked !"). And the recognition was real good too (not surprising, seeing the rather small vocabulary being used). But I think it would be mightily annoying to be in the same room with a guy playing this game all day.
BTW, I believe this product uses Lernout & Hauspie's speech recognition technology, for all you Flemish Slashdotters out there...
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It seems to me the Loki does straightfoward ports. It appears that they have developed a pretty robust toolset and they are able to port Windows software without too much difficulty. While each game no doubt requires adding to the tool-kit, voice recognition seems a bit off.
I'll be the first to admit that I haven't messed with sound much on Linux. My old 1.x kernel based Linux install choked on my PAS 16, and currently my Linux box is without sound... it all runs through the X Server on my NT machine.
However, from what I have seen, sound still doesn't have the super flexible API that MS produced. Quality or not, MS finally has a system for accessing sound cards without too much trouble. I have no doubt that Linux is pretty far along by now, but I doubt that sound integration is THAT pleasant. IIRC, there are two sound driver models... which is an improvement, but I don't see anything approaching DirectSound for at LEAST 6 months to a year.
Loki would no doubt reinvent the wheel. If the system that they bought/licensed abstracts enough, maybe they can plug in Linux sound support. But if the Linux sound capabilities isn't as flexible as the DirectSound, I wouldn't expect it.
Also, while porting old games is possible, most Linux users/gamers maintain a Win9x dual boot for games, releasing a Linux version a year down the road sounds like a bad business. Even if initial sales are solid, the later games will fail. While the novelty of a Linux port is solid in the beginning, in the end, how many people want to buy old games.
To get Linux ports, the userbase must demonstrate that there is a market (I believe there is, while Linux marketshare > %Windows users that are games), and must demonstrate that it is important to satisfy this market.
The trick is, companies must believe that a Linux port 6-12 months down the road isn't good enough. That requires companies that simultaneously release their versions see a large portion of Linux sales. If that happens, than maybe companies start working with Loki to port their game once the engine is largely complete. I mean, if properly abstracted, the game can write code that Loki can rewrite with their tools, and then the game is a straight recompile.
In a group project I was on, one person basically spend a day abstracting 1-2 line commands into a simple API. If we had to switch systems, he could rewrite his API in a day on the new system, and the higher level code would work without changes.
Portable code isn't difficult, you just abstract out all the hardware dependent features, and then have someone reimplement them. This may result in more work in the initial development, but it makes porting easier. Much like abstracting assembly code carefully, DirectX and other OS specific calls need to be abstracted away, so that they can reimplement on another system without trouble.
Alex
By the way, "tlhIngan Hol" is the name of our language ;) Good parts about the language? Power in the speech pattern. It is standard talk in the form of object->verb->subject. So "Lunch was aten by Richard" and "The guards fell victim to Worf" is kinda cool. That, and in order to learn it, you'll have to find the books (Power Klingon!) and fork over some cash for them. However, the sad stuff is letters and syllables of the language are much too closely derived from english, infact, slightly simpler. Really bad is the fact that only 2000 words actually exist in the language. Still, maybe one day I'll purchase the Klingon edition of Hamlet. :)
"Shell, start Netscape. Netscape, go to site slashdot dahdorg." How difficult is that?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Yeah, after a long gaming session, a fella's voice would tend to get hoarse.
Will I retire or break 10K?
No, I don't like Star Trek for its feeble attempts at indoctrination and social conditioning disguised as an "optimistic" view of the future.
Ahhh, so you prefer the indoctrination and social conditioning that you received.
Just in case anyone else was wondering, it can be downloaded here.
And here is a good "How to get started" -document.
When you smile, the world laughs at you.
Actually, there already is one. IBM's Via Voice should do everything you need. Freely available, IIRC, but not open source.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
A voice-controlled application with a limited context can indeed be made both speaker- and dialect-independent (within reasonable limits of course) and also without the need of lengthy training sessions. The problems you refer to typically occur when a system has to be able to do very hard things, such as taking dictation of arbitrary sentences with very large vocabularies into a word processor.
This is a common misunderstanding, probably because most commercially available voice-controlled applications today are dictation systems, quite different from what seems to be imagined in the Star Trek case.
Also, there is an official Klingon/English, English/Klingon dictionary available, appropriately titled "The Klingon/English Dictionary" =)
.- CitizenC (User Info)
...that does Klingon. How, umm, useful? I wonder what would be the Klingon version of "file! exit! no!" that I could shout to really annoy everyone using it near me ;-)
Am I the only one who thinks that trying to control a game by barking commands would be rather annoying? I mean, think about how annoying it is when you're playing Quake and you click the mouse button and it doesn't fire. Now imagine you yell a command (say, "attack.") and the computer misinterprets it as something else (say, "go back.") You're about to blow the hell out of a Klingon ship or whatever, and instead you start retreating and get shot in the ass.
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