Audio¶

Description¶

We use SNIPS as our voice assistant to interact with the robot with the voice.

ROS Installation¶

As SNIPS does not officially support Ubuntu Xenial, its intallation comes with a few caveat.

Run $ sudo npm install -g snips-sam to install SAM
Go to /usr/lib/node_modules/snips-sam/lib/session/ssh.js (or usr/local/lib/node_modules/snips-sam/lib/session/ssh.js) and change line 426 to […] echo "deb https://debian.snips.ai/stretch stable main" […]
Install an upstream version of libc $ sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:ubuntu-toolchain-r/test && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade -y libstdc++6
Connect with $ sam connect localhost
$ sam init
If you get an error at this stage, add this line your_username ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL at the end of your sudoers file with the command : $ sudo visudo, then try again from step 4.
Test the speaker with $ sam test speaker
Test the microphone with $ sam test microphone
If tests are not conclusive or quality is poor, try selecting a different speaker and microphone with : $ sam setup audio
Install our assistant $ wget https://github.com/projetdevine/static/releases/download/v0.0.1/assistant.zip && sudo unzip -o assistant.zip -d /usr/share/snips

Once the SNIPS team adds support for Ubuntu Xenial step 2 and 3 will not be necessary. Note that our assistant was tested for version 0.58.3 of the snips-platform-voice package.

Usage¶

$ roscore #start ROS master
$ rosrun devine_dialog snips.py __ns:=devine #run snips node
$ sam watch
$ rostopic echo /devine/tts/answer #listen to the answers

To send custom data to the topic used by snips, do :

$ rosrun rqt_gui rqt_gui

Select topic : /devine/tts/query
Select type : devine_dialog/TtsQuery
Select a frequency
Fill out the ‘text’ (ex: “Is the object blue ?”), ‘uid’ (ex: 1) and ‘answer_type’ (ex: 1) fields.

Or, run this command : $ rostopic pub /devine/tts/query devine_dialog/TtsQuery '{text: "Is the object blue?", uid: 1, answer_type: 1}'