Chatbot for ROS

Installation

sudo apt-get install sox
sudo apt-get install ros-groovy-audio-common
sudo apt-get install python pip
pip install flask

You will also need to clone audio-common into your catkin workspace, as well as rosbridge-suite. rosbridge-suite can also be installed with ros-groovy-rosbridge-suite, but the Debian repository is currently broken, which is why you need to clone the repository to your workspace instead.

Running

On a computer

Set the ROS Master URI to point to the robot. Open scripts/weblistener.py, and change the WebSocket host to your computer. It's assumed that the port will be 9090. Run:

roslaunch chatbot web.launch

On the robot

roslaunch chatbot robot.launch

Credits

Speech recognition uses the Web Speech API in Chrome.

Flask is used to run a simple web server.

Robot Web Tools is used to communicate with the ROS Master from a website.

The chatbot is based on the free Alice AIML set.

Google Translate is unofficially used to synthesize voices from text. SoX is used to convert the sound file.