During our last online meet, we attempted to figure out the best way to use the Google AIY kit to voice control the robot.
As it turned out, Google AIY wasn't as clever as we hoped. It couldn't understand half the words that we were saying, and when it guessed at our words it was usually completely wrong.
So we set about finding words that the computer could actually recognise.
We found that short, one syllable words like 'left' and 'right' didn't work at all - which is annoying since we kind of need our robot to be able to turn :/
The more we shouted at it, we found that the computer could recognise longer words and more unique words. We figured we could just substitute the shorter words (like left and right) with something longer.
Our first attempt was to just use normal commands, but in longer sentences e.g. instead of 'left' and 'right' we tried 'go left' or 'please go left', but that was still too tricky for the Google AIY to pick up on.
I suggested that we try random bigger words, so that it wouldn't be confusing (for the computer) but we still wanted all the words to match in some way, so that the controls wouldn't be too hard to remember for us (the humans).
So we settled on the very obvious answer - pasta.
"Fettuccine!" = forward
"Linguine!" = left
"Ratatouille!" = right
"Spaghetti!" = backward. We couldn't think of a pasta that started with B but we don't go backward on this challenge anyway.
It was better but still wasn't perfect because it kept interpreting "Fettuccine" as "Feta Cheese".
We'll keep working on it. We are very much looking forward to sending the judges a video of us shouting pasta at the robot, and being rewarded for our innovation and out of the box thinking.
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