About ACE

For those of you who don't know, ACE means Artificial Conversation Entity.  It is a program capable of listening to the user's speech, processing it, and then outputting a response.  It is very basic, having three components to it: the listening engine, the ALICE engine, and the speaking engine.  Here is a breakdown of them.

• The listening engine uses the Microsoft Speech Recognition interface to interpret user speech from a microphone.  I found it easy to program and very efficient, especially because it is free.
• The ALICE engine created by Dr. Wallace has the ability to take text input and parse though thousands of lines of responses to find the best one.  It was originally written in JAVA for internet chatting use, but the version I use is ported to C.
• The speaking engine is my favorite.  It uses the Microsoft Text to Speech interface.  What this does is it takes a text input and processes it into sound (with a lot of background work though.)

How ACE Works

To understand ACE, you must first know about its two child programs: ACE Configuration and ACE Commander.

ACE Configuration
ACE Configuration is the first component that should be run.  It allows the user to select the Internet browser, media player, and user command (described later) that he/she wants to incorporate. 

ACE Commander
ACE Commander gives the user the ability to make customized commands that can play videos, open web pages, run programs, or just respond the way the user wants. I can hold a total of 32,000+ commands, but I doubt anyone will ever input that many.  After you have the commands inputted,  save the file and use ACE Configuration to set ACE to use the commands.

ACE
ACE is the main program of the group.  It runs in the background and constantly checks for microphone input.  It first checks the input it receives with built-in commands such as checking the time and date, going to sleep, take a note, etc....  If it cannot find a match for  the built-in commands, it checks the user defined commands created in ACE Commander.  Finally, if it still does not find a match, it will use the ALICE engine to respond to the text. It is a simple three step process.

ACE Requirements

This is the only thing I don't like about ACE....
Speech Recognition is a new thing today.  So it is still very experimental, hence the LARGE memory consumption.
ACE has several requirement:

• Microsoft Windows 98/ME/2000/XP
• 10MB of hard drive space
• 64MB of RAM (128MB is recommended)
• A Microphone
• SAPI 5.1

What is SAPI 5.1?  SAPI is Speech Application Programming Interface.  It is the power behind speech recognition and text to speech.  Thus, it is a definite must. 
THE BAD NEWS
However, since SAPI 5.1 is a 50MB download, I can not put it on my page.  I did find a link where SAPI 5.1 can be downloaded an installed onto your machine. 
THE GOOD NEWS
For the geeks running Windows XP, have no fear, SAPI 5.1 is already on your computer.  It comes standard with Windows XP Professional and Home edition.  Also, if you aren't running a copy of Windows XP, but you do happen to have Microsoft Office XP, SAPI 5.1 is on there too!  All that you have to do is install the feature.  This can be done by running MS Word XP, selecting the "Tools" menu item, and then select "Speech" from the dropdown box.  MS Office will then ask if you would like to install the feature.  If you already installed it, you are just fine.

ACE Built-in Commands

Here is a list of the commands that I have implemented into ACE so far:

ACE Download

Finally, after all that, time for the download.  Just go to the download page.
NOTE: It would be best to train the speech recognition system at least two times before using ACE.
Do this by going into control panel, double click "Speech", and then click the "Train" button.

Download ACE 1.13 (1.0MB) - New version of ACE tested on Windows XP and Windows 98
Download SAPI 5.1 (48MB)
Download SAPI 5.1 (48MB) Mirror site

ACE 1.1x New Features

I put in a few new features that were recommended to me by a friend in the new version of ACE.  These features should increase the overall speed of ACE, and also adds a fix to problems such as random talking.  A new system tray icon have been implemented so that the user knows when ACE is running in the background.  From the system tray icon, the user can toggle a feature called Interrupt ACE.  This feature, when turned off, will enable ACE to ignore all user input while it is currently talking, hence eliminating unnecessary talkback.  This feature is located in the OPTIONS MENU when right clicking the ACE system tray icon.

 

Special Thanks

Thanks to:
The ALICE AI  Foundation and Dr. Wallce.
Jacco Bikker
Gentee, Inc.

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