The VPALib library

We have created a library that contains the code which connects with Pandorabots. Any app that wants to incorporate an agent just has to deal with the interface aspects, such as the GUI appearance and the control of the speech recognition and synthesis.

The VPALib library uses ASRLib, TTSLib, and XMLLib to manage speech recognition, speech synthesis, and asynchronous tasks when retrieving web contents (you can see it if you check the libs folder in the VPALib project). This way, it can focus on the code required to manage the VPA behavior.

The main class in the VPALib library is the Bot class, which sends queries to the Pandorabots website, parses the results, and carries out the corresponding actions on the device.

When a new bot is created, we must specify an ID to the constructor. This is the ID in the Pandorabots site (for example, d7b695cf0e344c0a for Jack). Also, we can specify its topic of specialization. For example, if the bot is specialized for providing information...