Yorick 2.0: The Split Personality

Introduction

When Yorick was first brought to life, he had Alexa’s voice. A lot of his charm was the incongruity between his appearance and his voice. At the same time, a number of folks asked about having a creepier voice and I wanted to try to do that for this Halloween. An update to the AlexaPi project added support for the SoX audio playback handler as an alternative to VLC. SoX has support for audio effects, so it became possible to change Yorick’s output voice. I didn’t want to lose Alexa’s voice, so I edited the AlexaPi code so that it would recognize both “Alexa” and “Yorick” as trigger words, with the output sound depending on which trigger word you used. As a result, Yorick now responds either as Alexa or with his own voice.

Just like Elliot on Mr. Robot, Yorick now has a split personality.

ConYoriversations

I talked to Yorick, aka Alexa, a bit about Halloween:

It turns out that Yorick is a baseball fan and was rather disappointed that the Washington Nationals aren’t in the World Series. Awhile back, I asked him about going to one of the playoff games:

Technical Notes

AlexaPi uses PocketSphinx for recognizing the trigger word. The original code is set up to recognize a single trigger word or phrase, which you can easilly change in a yaml configuration file. However PocketSphinx can recognize multiple keywords or phrases selected from a python list. Some editing of the AlexaPi source code was needed in order to change the trigger from a single variable to a list. Similarly, the code was modified slightly so that once a trigger word was recognized it checks which word was used. If the trigger word is “Yorick” it changes the pitch and speed of the audio output.

I used version 1.5 of AlexaPi. This and previous versions had a problem in that the temporary file names used were the response code that the Alexa voice service returned. These sometimes included characters that were illegal for file names or that were too long for a file name. I patched these problems (and later versions of AlexaPi have fixed this problem).

In addition, the servo motion routines had to be modified slightly, as version 1.5 and later of AlexaPi begins streaming questions to the Alexa voice service as they are asked, rather than waiting until the question is finished. This results in a faster response time.