Hal Macintosh.

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Hal Macintosh.

Is there a program in OS X that will allow your macintosh to become like Hal? what I mean is. I say a command and it replies, with a voice. like a personality. ie. "Good morning Computer (or any name you assign)" "good morning Mr. or Ms. Doe".

kind of like you see in the movies. call me crazy but i think computers and software are developed far enough that we should have something like that.

Am I just not finding it or does it not exist?

Tiger G5 Kid's picture
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Applescript?

If you're good with Applescript, why don't you try building a program?
It's fairly easy, by using the say and listen commands.

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What A Neat Idea!

Hey!

ABSOLUTELY you can do that!

There is a program for PCs [blecch....] called "Roger Wilco."
You say *anything* you want and it executes whatever function you assigned to that phrase!

There are programs that play sounds -- music, fx, dialog -- when you execute a function.

Put the 2 together & VOILA!

Say "Good Morning, Computer!" > "Roger Wilco" takes the "Good Morning, Computer!" phrase and assigns it to the boot up function > The play-a-sound-when-executing-a-function program when executing the "boot up" function then says the phrase "Hello, John Doe...."

And yes -- the technology was there during the "APPLE ][+" era! lol

Later!
-CaryMG
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HOWEVER...

...trying to emulate the voice of Douglass Rain (the voice actor for Hal) is not easy. I looked into this about a year ago and discovered that the only real way to do this would be to sample all of the phonetics of his voice from movie track sounbytes and then clone and edit an existing PlainTalk voice and compile it somehow.

I could not find anythign out there that was off-the-shelf for this.

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HOWEVER...

...trying to emulate the voice of Douglass Rain (the voice actor for Hal) is not easy. I looked into this about a year ago and discovered that the only real way to do this would be to sample all of the phonetics of his voice from movie track sounbytes and then clone and edit an existing PlainTalk voice and compile it somehow.

I could not find anythign out there that was off-the-shelf for this.

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Oh.....

Hey!

Earthmage, you mean you wanted the "HAL 9000" voice to say *anything*?
OK -- I thought you meant you just wanted the samplings from "2001"....

Hmmm....

doug-doug the mighty's idea sounds doug-doug the mighty fine! lol

Later!
-CaryMG
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No, I don't care what voice s

No, I don't care what voice says it (actually a choice would be nice so you can customize your computers personality) I just want it to be able to respond to my words. But in a non linear way. More iRobotesq than Star trek.

Jon
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You could use Speakable Items

You could use Speakable Items/Speech Recognition in System Preferences to do speech control and custom edit commands to do a function then run an AppleScript to make it say a response. If you write a suitable AS it could say whatever you want in various random ways of your own design.

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There is definately something

There is definately something very much like Hal, an old AI program called "Eliza"! Even a lot of IRC and MUD bots an handle this kind of interaction. I am too noob to do this, but one could implement Eliza in OpenMCL, and interface it to the speech recognition frameworks. Then you could be verbally rapping with your jive-ass mac. Eliza code is published in a lot of AI literature and probably online, and the HI frameworks aren't even like real coding most of the time - even I have been able to get a few things to work. You could definately make your mac conversational, after a fashion!

M

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I once modified the Speech Fe

I once modified the Speech Feedback program for it to look like hal, there's a picture of it here http://www.spymac.com/gallery/show_photo.php?picid=11065

The bad news is the file got damaged and I don't have the source anymore, and its not in any backup i made Sad

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There used to be an app that

There used to be an app that did all the hal voices for mac so 9.1 and below. You could use the sounds from that.

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