I am giving a talk at the local Node user group on building a life embetterment robot. This is my current outline.

how_to_train_your_robot.md

How To Train Your Robot

Not that kind of robot

This kind of robot

What is this robot you speak of?

Enter: Hubot

What is Hubot?

• Hew-bot
• A Customizable, Kegorator-Powered Life Embetterment Robot
• Written in Node.js and Coffeescript
• Uses Redis to persit data in its "Robot Brain"

What is Coffeescript?

• The Devil
• CoffeeScript is an attempt to expose the good parts of JavaScript in a simple way.
• Written By Jeremy Ashkenas
• Compiles to vanilla Javascript, with no interpretation at runtime

So what do you use Hubot for?

• Originally as a chat bot and to automate running tests etc.
• Generating memes
• General time-wasting

How do you use Hubot?

Adapters

• connects Hubot to the outside world

Syntax sugar that is coffeescript

Scripts

• Repo managed by github
• stuff the robot actually does

Script

• Two ways .respond and .hear, respond requires a prompt (primary way)
• send the message out

But wait there's more!

• I started thinking about how limiting pre-built life-embetterment robots were
• Hubot is command driven, Siri and Google I have little control over their tasks
• What if I could merge the two?

Enter: Natural Language Processing

• I started looking into how I could get Hubot to understand me more naturally
• My wife's a Master of English so I began asking her to re-teach me english syntax
• How do I get the computer to understand English?
• Tokenizing, trying to find relevant words etc.
• Started building my own language processor...really, really hard.

To the Googles! Da na na na na na

• Started looking for open source natural language processors for node.js
• Not nearly as roboust as I wanted

What I found

• Stanford Language Processor
  • Java App
  • Had node run it in a sub shell and pass it stuff
  • Really slow
  • Returns garbage, so I needed to create an adapter to conver to JSON

Still not what I wanted

Enter: Elastic Search

• Combined with the HTML Web Speech API
• I could now just send the entire string and get weighted results

So How'd you do it

• Well naturally I named my robot Jarvis
• And naturally I wanted him to speak in a British accent

Enter: ElasticSearch

• I could now just send plain english to my database and get weighted results
• results will have a string that will match one of the hubot scripts regex, low manipulation of hubot core.

Enter: i18next

• Run all of the robot's responses through tranlsation
• Sectioning out the parts of speech
• Localizing responses to time of day and randomizing similar response phrases

What Does It Look Like?

• SQLite
• Elastic Search
• Rails
• Node (Hubot)
• XMPP

Why Rails

• I looked at node options for elastic search apis and found that for speed of development and general niceness the Tire gem was great.
• Good Practice

The Gift of Speech

• Hijack Apple's speech files to get a cool British accent
• Have node execute say commands in a sub shell to get the robot talking

Spike: Language is inherently synchronous, Node is not

• The robot was talking over himself
• Quick touch on the async library and managing control flows with node
• Show stupid binding in coffeescript

Nitty Gritty

• XMPP adapter for Hubot for use with a web interface
• Jarvis talks to his "Brain" which is a SQLite with a rails server on top
• uses XMPP
• Why Rails? Because the Tire gem is amazeballs
• The "brain" responds with an "executable" object which node will then parse the json and execute the function contained in the object.
• Still uses is lesser Redis brain for simple things

What's next?

• I would like to build a more robust web interface for him so that he can respond with visuals as well as audio and text

Quick Demo

I suppose I should touch on writing scripts for Hubot

Yeah scripts would be good.

Forseeable questions, putting on the user hat:

1. What's a Redis? Is it actually red?
2. So what exactly is i18next? Something to do with translation, you say?
3. Diagram outlining the workflow of the bot ('Nitty Gritty' in a picture rather than just bullet points)?

Also, for presenting, I really dig the Reveal.js that @mrDarcyMurphy used for his presentation last week http://lab.hakim.se/reveal-js/#/

Gonna be schweeeeeet.

I can't believe your hubot's name isn't german.