Berkeley Andrus: We at DRAGN Labs are very interested in open-domain chatbots – bots that can converse intelligently on any topic, just like a human can. In fact, Dr. Fulda spent a year of her PhD research leading a team for the Amazon Alexa Prize, where she and her team created BYU_EVE. Improvements to these sorts of chatbots are making science fiction become reality right before our eyes.
But open-domain chatbots aren’t the only type of voice recognition systems capable of changing the world. Automated voice assistants that turn on our lights, send text messages to our friends, and adjust our thermostats have already worked their ways into many of our lives, and they are here to stay.
This year Dr. Fulda created and taught BYU’s first ever Speech Interfaces class. While the class covered the high-level principles behind open-domain conversation, most of the actual projects and assignments involved more limited — but still functional — applications. Students created voice interfaces to help users clock in and out of work, learn more about their favorite books and authors, learn a new language, and even look up Dungeons and Dragons spells.
The final class project was called Voice Control the World. It was based on the idea that voice interfaces aren’t just for conveying information, they can actually impact the physical world around us. To this end, students were tasked with making a voice application that controlled a physical or simulated object or system.
The students came up with some awesome applications, and many gave permission for me to post them to advertise the class and the power of voice interfaces. You can see some of the demo videos that were made at dragn.ai/speech-interface-projects/. Hope you enjoy!
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