Project Summary

Inspired by the intelligent personal agents (IPAs) rolled out by all the big tech giants in the industry like Google (Google Home), Amazon (Alexa), Microsoft (Cortana) and Apple (Siri), I was motivated to build one of my own and understand what it takes to build an IPA from scratch. I decided to choose a very simple task of changing the colors of an icon on screen using voice and get my first CUI up and running.

Duration: 10days

Software used: Dialogflow

Ask Chameleon to change colorsCODE

Limitations and Future Work

  • The agent does not change to non-mainstream colors like “mauve” but the text/speech that appears says that it changed to that color. Next step is to code the colors by hex codes and not by the names.
  • To make the conversation smooth, there has to be robust recovery strategies when the system doesn’t understand the user utterances. Next step is to improve the error messages and make them less repetitive and more natural.
  • Currently, I am using the default Dialogflow voice but for the next steps, I would like to experiment with the voice prosody using SSML.

The aim of this project was to learn by making and by failing in the time frame of 10 days.