Isabella: Growing

Previously on Dr. Lambda's blog:

In a previous post I presented my newest pet project: Isabella. Isabella is a voice controlled personal assistant, like Siri, Alexa, and others. We have decided to investigate how difficult it is to make such a program. In the last post we integrated Isabella with the first external API: Youtube.

Now, the continuation...

The fun part

This next part of a project like this, is the best! Because all the basic functionality, and structure is already in place, so adding new functionality is super easy. In this case adding more API is just a few lines of code, which means that it really feels like something is happening.

In a lot of the projects we work on there are so much code around that making a change is barely noticeable. To add to this, making even a small change, we usually need to spend a lot of extra time testing that our change didn't break any of the other stuff. Tedious, but necessary, work.

At this stage Isabella is still just a nimble little thing, and so there is barely anything to test. We have also enforced an extremely low coupling between different parts, thus there is no way adding something new could affect any existing commands.

So, for the next while we are just going to be integrating more and more APIs.

Jokes, and political correctness

When we tested Alexa, one of the best features was that she could tell jokes, so of course Isabella should be able to do that too. Therefore we set out of a quest to find a good joke API. This was a surprisingly difficult task, as a lot of them are either outdated, or not-free. I did eventually find this one, and the jokes are exactly my style.

In Alexa, and probably the others as well, the developers have another challenge here. Their product has to appeal to a very wide audience. Therefore they have to be careful not to offend anyone with f.ex. Alexa's jokes. Our goal is not to make a wide spread product, so we can just have Isabella say what we want, no politics.

Convenience is king!

Earlier this year I switched my lights to Phillips Hue, so I could control them from my phone. That was so much easier, as a lot of my light switches are in inconvenient places. Therefore I immediately got super used to controlling all the lights from my phone. I have a few lights which I could not switch over, for different reasons, and now I just avoid using these lights because I can't do it from my phone.

This made me re-realize the truth of the statement "Convenience is king!", and so you can imagine how it felt when I integrated Hue into Isabella, so I could control everything by speech. Someone made a great API for it – for Typescript (yes, he included the typings), so thanks to that guy!