Isabella: Touch-y Feel-y

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 did another SPIKE for the programming part of Isabella.

Now, the continuation...

Feelings

I have worked a bit with game programming, and design. I really enjoy it. There are so many interesting aspects of it, and once you study something like that, you start noticing it everywhere. Why do I bring this up?

We would like Isabella to be as relatable as possible. This is because, then we have more control over users, and the more Isabella feels like a human, the higher our tolerance for errors. One way to do this is to add a "feeling game". Here we mean, a small system where some things, like rude behavior, will affect the way she behaves and responds. Of course this should not be detrimental to the functionality, but there is still some room to work with.

To facilitate this we needed to rewrite a large portion of the matching system, and while doing this we also refactored our every "eval", and changed all callbacks to "promises". This is footnote, yet the task took hours and hours.

Having done this we could separate the "fluffy" part of responses, the "it is ___ o'clock" from the "9:45". Now we simply say that if she is in a good mood she says the entire thing, otherwise she only give the bare, cold information.

Now we just need something to affect her mood. The first thing we added was good and bad words, like cussing, or saying "please" and "thank you". We then had a cool idea. All speech recognition has the challenge of understanding variations of commands. Here we have a brand new innovation: we can teach our users. We tied the matching score to her mood, so the harder she has to work to figure out what you want the less happy she will be.

We also have plans for having offensive jokes or quotes, affect her mood as well, this way regaining some of the political correctness we threw away earlier in development. She might still say something inappropriate but at least she'll be mad about it as well.