Mission Briefing
To create the Processing sketches for this project, we will need to install the Processing library ttslib. This library is a wrapper around the FreeTTS Java library that helps us to write a sketch that reads out text. We will learn how to change the voice parameters of the kevin16 voice of the FreeTTS package to make our robot's voices distinguishable. We will also create a parser that is able to read the Shakespeare script and which generates text-line objects that allow our script to know which line is read by which robot.
A Drama thread will be used to control the text-to-speech objects, and the draw() method of our sketch will print the script on the screen while our robots perform it, just in case one of them forgets a line. Finally, we will use some cardboard boxes and a pair of cheap speakers to create the robots and their stage. The following figure shows how the robots work:
Why Is It Awesome?
Since the 18th century, inventors have tried to build talking machines (with varying success). Talking toys swamped the market in the 1980s and 90s. In every decent Sci-Fi novel, computers and robots are capable of speaking. So how could building talking robots not be awesome? And what could be more appropriate to put these speaking capabilities to test than performing a Shakespeare play? So as you see, building actor robots is officially awesome, just in case your non-geek family members should ask.
Your Hotshot Objectives
We will split this project into four tasks that will guide you through the generation of the robots from beginning to end. Here is a short overview of what we are going to do:
Making Processing talk
Reading Shakespeare
Adding more actors
Building robots
