cobotDS Goodies Page

NEW NEWS:

  • February 16 2001: We have added "speak" as a synonym for say. Some find it easier to use.

    INFORMATION FOR PHONE TRIAL PARTICIPANTS:

    The trial will hopefully be pretty simple. It will start on Wednesday, January 10 (hopefully), and will run for 10 days. During these 10 days, we would simply like you to make at least 10 calls to the system. Ideally, these calls will be longer rather than shorter, and will exercise the functionality of the system.

    The only preparation you need to do is to read the highly abbreviated user manual, and afterwards, to send us your "personal grammar". Please send this to HFh by email at isbell@research.att.com or moomail. We'll also ask you to complete a brief questionaire after the trial is completed.

    You are also encouraged to do a sample phone call following this tutorial script that will familiarize you with the commands and other functionality.

    You will receive, by MOO-mail, a reminder of the toll-free number for the system, as well as your numeric four-digit password.

    Many thanks, and Happy Calling!

    LINKS TO OTHER DOCUMENTATION:

  • Listing of the allowed utterances in the CLICHE grammar (Last update: October 3, 2000)

  • Listing of the allowed utterances in the SMALLTALK/CONVERSATION grammar (Last update: October 4, 2000)

  • Description of the main command loop grammar (Last update: January 8, 2001)

  • cobotDS user manual (Last update: October 7, 2000)

    NEWS AND NOTES:

  • February 16 2001: We have added "speak" as a synonym for say. Some find it easier to use.

  • October 20, 2000: We have added a "listen" command. When you execute "listen" at the main command loop, from then on, each prompt you receive will also include a complete synthesized-speech recital of ALL the activity that has taken place in the Living Room (or wherever cobot is) since the last prompt. Thus, the "listen" command lets you have a better sense of what is going on in the MOO, since you'll hear everything (not just the stuff directed to you via MOOers executing "-cobot phone: ").

    When in listening mode, each distinct event in the MOO will be separated in the synthesized speech by the phrase "and then". We found this was necessary to have any hope of distinguishing one event from another.

    To turn the listening off, execute the command "mute" at the main command loop. Then you will be returned to the normal mode in which you only receive things explicitly directed towards you via cobot.

    The "listen" command is quite experimental at this point. We've already found that during busy times, the listening may fall quite far behind the actual MOO activity. Eventually we'll try to provide various summarization mechanisms on the listening mode that will let you keep up (at the expense of not hearing everything verbatim, but hopefully enough detail to make it worthwhile). In the meantime, the kludgy way of catching up to the action is to "mute" and then "listen" again, which will result in the queue of events to be read out being flushed.

    If you have any ideas on summarization or other comments on the listen command, let us know.

  • October 20, 2000: The command grammar has been updated below to include the addition of "listen" and "mute" described above, and also there are some new phone user names there.

  • October 7, 2000: Updated the command grammar listing below, which recognizes several new user names. Also, the user manual will not be continually updated to reflect the most recent grammars, since we're providing those on this page.

  • October 4, 2000: Added link below to the description of the main command loop grammar. There are also several new commands available to phone users, including @love and @pickup (which are prounounced simply as "love" and "pickup" over the phone). Note that the LambdaMOO user names appearing in this grammar are those you can pass as arguments to verbs over the phone, but not all these users have phone accounts yet.

  • October 4, 2000: Due to difficulties with the recognition of the word "smalltalk", this grammar may now be referred to as either "smalltalk" or "conversation" when specifying the grammar to cobotDS.

  • October 4, 2000: The smalltalk/conversation grammar has been slightly expanded, and its listing below has been updated.

    Last Edited: January 4, 2001