Here's the basic layout of the system.

The layer will accept inputs in two forms-

1. Regular text
2. Speech

The speech input will first have to be converted to text
using a speech recognition system called Sphinx. Since this
conversion is usually error prone, the text will be enhanced
using knowledge of the system.

After this, it can be handled in a similar way to regular text input.

At the first phase, a parser will generate a tree and tags for
a given user command. For this, a statistical parser written in
Java at the Stanford University Natural Language Group will be used, it can be checked here.

After this, the analyzer will try to determine the kind of action the user wants to perform and then the application specific interpreter will try to find the arguments in the natural language text, for example if a user wants to play some music, the title, artist, genre etc will probably be mentioned in the text, that will have to be mined.

Several times, the system will not be completely sure of the result generated, hence user recommendation will be taken to improve the accuracy.

Hi all.. Hmm well, through this blog I hope to communicate to everyone interested, the progress of my GSoC Project, still untitlted (you could help there) project. The idea is to make a functional "Natural Language + Voice User Interface for openSUSE Desktop" (the abstract can be viewed here).

So here I am with a replaced motherboard and upgraded RAM in my laptop, all gung-ho to start my first dream project.. And at this very moment, I need some help :P

The project is about making a software layer which lets a computer understand a user's commands in a natural language (through text or speech), which is why I'd like some people to give in a sample of their natural language commands. To give a clue, if I could give commands to your computer in English, I'd say things like this --

1. "Privately message Nihar Joshi on Google Talk"
2. "Enqueue all the Coldplay songs in the player"

I do have a basic strategy in place to understand such commands, the first step being a parser, after which an application-specific analyzer will convert such a command to a bash command (which can be executed directly on a Linux platform). However, since commands in a natural language like English can be of a very wide variety and my strategy might be suffering from a lack of perspective, I'd like to take inputs from several sources to test my strategy.

Imagine that you do have such a system working on your computer, what kind of commands would you like to give to your computer in English? Please don't restrict yourself to my examples and try to think of all routine desktop activities you perform on your computer. Should you prefer anonymity you can mail me your list at mohit.verma.in@gmail.com with subject "GSoC help".

Cheers and looking forward to your support, (support open source, thats what good guys do :P )

The openSUSE Community Week is over now and the openSUSE-Education Team participated with great success. The review of our simple generic schedule containing just the times where Team members hanging around looks like a good solution: many people have joined or IRC-Channel (#opensuse-edu) on Freenode during this time, started asking simple questions – and often we’ve interesting discussions (and technical solutions) afterwards.

Here’s a short subjective excerpt of the week:

• openSUSE is now officially on the Sugar radar as being a main distro behind Fedora! We will provide a Sugar-Live Media based on the packages from the Sugar repository in the Build service, soon. (The current openSUSE-Live Media already contains a desktop icon starting sugar-emulator.)
• The final release of openSUSE-Education for 11.1 makes big progress. Yes: we’ve still no final frozen Repository on opensuse-education.org – but at the moment it’s just filling up the repo with packages not available on the official openSUSE-DVD.
• One of the biggest success stories from this week: cyberorg started pulishing and polishing our Live-Media, including the latest openSUSE Updates and our new “Li-f-e” branding theme (thanks to Sam!).
• We also reached the interesting point where people ask if they can distribute our downloadable ISO-Images on real medias for money. At the moment, adding your compensation for expenses of burning, shipping, etc. is ok. But please inform us or the openSUSE-Board, if you start marketing and shipping.
• The Novell-Training team allows us to package their training material for openSUSE – and even better: they licensed it under a Creative Commons License! So from now on, we can provide professional training material for openSUSE starters!
• We started specialized ISO images for small kids, school desktops and servers. More will come in the next weeks.
• We got our own Category here on lizards.opensuse.org – so it should be easier to find openSUSE-Education related topics here on lizards.opensuse.org from now on.
• SLEducator starts providing support via skype – if anyone wants to speak to him directly, just phone “os4ed_support”
• Jeff Shantz has started to work on the YaST2 Education Module – and is happy to receive opinions on what is needed. Currently, he has a big list of topics – some are already discussed in our mailinglist.
• We start a discussion about the initial greeter for new users: currently, this is an “openSUSE” only greeter – perhaps we can patch the current one and adapt it for our Li-f-e images.
• Talked about real “one-click-installs” for server based applications like drupal, moodle, koha and so on. Target is a running application – ready to use. The YaST2 Education module might be a solution – another one might be subpackages doing all needed things via scripts.

There are for sure many more topics discussed during the week – the above is just covered by me. Looking at the list, I’m very interested how we will look like on one or two years…

Starting Firefox after the update failed with the following message: "Could not find compatible GRE between version ...".
In the Mozilla Buidservice repo I use (http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/mozilla/openSUSE_11.0/i586/) the
xulrunner package is updated to 1.9.0.11 (mozilla-xulrunner190-1.9.0.11-2.2.i586.rpm) while Firefox is still 3.0.10 (MozillaFirefox-3.0.10-3.1.i586.rpm). Just downgrade xulrunner* to 1.9.0.10 and everything should work again.

Well, this is my first use of this tool so this will be short, I want to see how what I type gets presented and where, so bare with me.
Last week was openSUSE community week, For the Education Team things were pretty much “status quo” we have an exciting team.
We have announced several new features, new live disks and achievements. Please visit us at #opensuse-edu on irc.freenode.net anytime

Last week we released Tomboy 0.14.2, a new stable release with a lot of fixes cherry-picked from the development branch. We remedied a couple of crashes, squashed some weird errors and behavior, and we even improved memory usage and start-up performance. Here are the highlights:

• Start Tomboy in 25% less time
  
• Fix random start-up crash on distros like Ubuntu 9.04
  
• Recognize presence of FUSE when built into kernel (not as module)
  
• Fix error when opening New Note Template on Ubuntu 9.04
  
• Stop seeing "this/that/other" as a file link (whoops!)
  
• Don't crash when opening invalid or improperly-formatted notes
  
• Better error-reporting on Windows
  
• Updated cross-platform documentation
  
• Updated translations

This start-up performance fix was also in 0.15.0, but I didn't realize how significant it was until after I'd already announced it. We found that this simple fix saved us around 25% on Tomboy start-up. On my system, start-up time was cut from 4 seconds to 3 seconds (these are warm starts, I did not have time to test cold starts).

These traces were created using Ruben's patch and Federico's graphing tool. You can click them to see the full graphs (note that apps run slower with tracing turned on). Compare the numbers for setting up our AddinManager in 0.14.1...


...versus the new numbers for 0.14.2...



The funny thing is, all I did was change a couple of lines in our Mono.Addins initialization code to reflect the latest recommendations of the maintainer.

This "free" boost isn't even part of the low-hanging fruit I keep talking about when it comes to Tomboy performance optimizations. I'm working on another fix that should cut down on memory consumption, too, and you should expect performance improvements in every release this cycle. If you would like to help us set up an automated way to track memory usage and start-up time in Tomboy, that would be an awesome contribution. :-)

Following the GNOME schedule, our next development release, Tomboy 0.15.1, is scheduled for May 25. Stay tuned for some exciting announcements!

This post brought to you by the Tomboy Blogposter add-in.

As posted to the openSUSE-GNOME Mailing List.

---

Greetings!

Thanks to all who showed up to help on the bug day on
Friday, your efforts are greatly appreciated.

We started with just over 70 bugs and left the *obby
session available over the weekend.  By the end of the
weekend, we had reviewed 14 bugs (9 of which we closed).

These were all Critical and Major bugs listed for openSUSE
11.1.

I will be closing the *obby session this afternoon at about
1700 CDT.

Thanks again!
—
Christopher M. Hobbs [chobbs@siloamsprings.com]
Network Administrator, City of Siloam Springs

Because I feel a tad bit guilty about missing all of the Community Week sessions this week (school and work training, and before you ask, I’ve got more training all this weekend, so I can’t make those sessions either), I did decide to do a quick tour of the GNOME Shell, one of the integral parts of the GNOME 3 series, scheduled to be coming out in 2010 or so.

First, big thanks to Vincent Untz for packaging the GNOME Shell packages for openSUSE! I’m using these packages for my testing purposes

Here’s the quick tour:

First, here’s the openSUSE 11.1 desktop w/ GNOME 2.24 running GNOME Shell:

Note the Activity menu and the specially-capulated notification area. Good stuff. I al so like the stylized panel, but I don’t like it at the top. When  openSUSE adopts GNOME 3, I’d like to see it moved to the bottom.

Clicking on the Activity menu opens this menu. The desktop shrinks into a side (and you can create or remove as many as you wish, which is seriously awesome), and opens the most recent Applications and documents (I think). If you wish to open an application, double-click or drag the icon onto the desktop you wish it to open to.

Here I did a simple search for SUSE. Applications and documents that matched that search pop up (although I’m not sure what indexing service that is, I’m relatively sure it’s not Beagle, openSUSE’s desktop search indexer).

Here’s an expanded view of the search for apps with SUSE. The desktops slide out of the way, and a multi-column (and page) view pops up. To open, drag an icon over to the right (onto the desktop).

Overall, I like it. Combined with the new stuff coming next year in GNOME 3, this could be quite an interesting release. One of the most important things to note is that this interface seems incredibly tailored toward netbook’s small screens.

What do you think?

Tonight I stumbled upon the solution to a irritating little problem I have had for a long time. I use autologin and every time I log in I get prompted for my keyring password in order to access the wireless network. I have googled for this problem numerous times in the past without any luck. All the suggested solutions had to do with Ubuntu and a tool called libpam-keyring. This does not seem to work the same on openSuSE as on Ubuntu and did not help me much. Then I found this post. Towards the bottom of the thread is the instructions that have been evading me for so long. Hope this helps someone else.

Federico, give Tab Mix Plus a go. It lets you do what you're asking about, and more besides.