.Dust

A few weeks ago I bought a Nabaz­tag and I was impressed by func­tion­al­i­ties and pos­si­bil­i­ties of the “first sec­ond con­nected rab­bit”.

I started play­ing with it and after a few days I decided to explore a lit­tle bit deeper in the ser­vices that I could run.

I came across opennab that is basi­cally a proxy server for Nabaz­tags and offers a smart enough plu­gin archi­tec­ture to develop cus­tom services.

Since I am a big fan of Jaiku the first thing I was think­ing was: Since I always have a web page open on my Jaiku stream why can­not the Nabaz­tag check that stream on my behalf and read them to me using some kind of TTS?

This is how Nabaz­Jaiku was born.

Nabaz­Jaiku is a (very) quick and (very) dirty php script that plugs in the opennab archi­tec­ture and mon­i­tors my Jaiku streams. When updates are avail­able they are for­mat­ted in a plain text file that is processed by a TTS engine and then sent to the Nabaztag.

If some of you is inter­ested in hav­ing a lit­tle bit more tech­ni­cal details on how the thing works just drop a com­ment. I will even­tu­ally pub­lish a ded­i­cated page when I will have fin­ished some fine tun­ing on the TTS speech engine.

Yes­ter­day night I put the whole thing on my server and since then I am lis­ten­ing to Jaiku updates through my Nabaztag.

The inter­est­ing thing here is that there is an inter­ac­tion between a web ser­vice (Jaiku) and a real device (Nabaztag).

I think there are plenty of appli­ca­tions like this for a Nabaz­tag or other con­nected devices.

A video of an early ver­sion of the appli­ca­tion is embed­ded in this post. The ver­sion I was using did not have any con­trol of the TTS engine through the SSML (Speech Syn­the­sis Markup Lan­guage) so you will hear a stream of voice with no pauses between Jaiku posts. The last ver­sion of the script has much more control.

One of the issue that need to be solved is try­ing to iden­tify in which lan­guage Jaiku posts are writ­ten.. This is goin to be tought and will prob­a­bly never hap­pen.Why do I blog this? You know, at the end of the day I’m a geek.

Related posts:

1. Addicted to Jaiku
2. My fat mobile phone
3. italia​.it and frus­tra­tion in innovation
4. Is 3G deliv­er­ing on its promise?
5. The .Dust Podcast