I am scoping out a custom dictation application to be built using MS SAPI 5. I would like to be able to change the grammar (topic) of dictation dynamically based on what is being recognized. For example, if my dictation application deals with car repair, then, if I detect the speaker talking about engine, I want to bring in a dictation topic optimized for recognizing engine part names, as opposed to cabin upholstery.
Anyone know if this is possible?
Thanks.
-Raj
I believe your biggest hurdle will be in developing a "fool proof" method of identifying what topic is being discussed. To reference your own statement, " talking about engine", if you simply listen for engine and key off of that word you would not be able to for instance use the word engine to represent both a car engine and a software gaming engine. I have used a couple of speech synthesizers. The ones i have used wait for specific commands to begin listening. Perhaps you could have a combination of start listening commands.
USER "Computer, start listening."
COMPUTER "Ready to Listen."
USER "Car engines."
COMPUTER "Loading Car Engine Library."
Something like this might be a reasonable approach to your problem while still allowing yourself the flexibility of adding libraries. You could also utilize this approach to implement a default library. If the second command given isn't a recognized library then the program could use the default library.
Related
I'm using the same code that is still working for a new version of equipment the company the bought.
I can't communicate with the equipment in vb in visual studio (the language of the last code I wrote). But I can make a simple code in LabVIEW to see if the equipment is communicating and it is.
So, my question is what code is labview sending to the equipment?
The only thing I see from the LabVIEW GUI is *IDN?\n
Is that the same as what I writing?
mySerialport.WriteLine("*idn?" + Chr(10))
*IDN?\n
is not the same as :
mySerialport.WriteLine("*idn?" + Chr(10))
The former is capitalized while the later is not and it may cause an issue depending on the instrument.
You are using the serial port, so the most important thing to consider is the baud rate. It is possible that the later model equipment your company purchased has a different baud rate to the one that was used previously.
If you want to see exactly the data that LabVIEW is sending, you can use NI IO Trace or a non NI serial port monitor such as listed here
The question isn’t what language LabVIEW uses. LabVIEW is a programming environment with library APIs to speak to lots of hardware and the ability for anyone to write code to speak to even more hardware. The question is “what language does the HARDWARE speak?” To answer that, you’d post what kind of hardware it is and probably go to the manufacturer’s website for a spec sheet.
“*IDN?/n” looks like a GPIB command, which is just a framework serial protocol. You’d need the spec sheet of the hardware to know the particular commands that your hardware understands.
PS: LabVIEW doesn’t have a GUI showing anything about hardware communication. You have an application written in LabVIEW that has a GUI that is displaying information. You can edit the program to print out more info if you want, just like you could in VB. Complaining about the “LabVIEW GUI” in this case is equivalent to complaining about the Visual Studio GUI when the problem is with the program you’ve written in VS!
"The only thing I see from the labview GUI is *IDN?/n"
That sounds more like you are using the VISA Test Panel in MAX (Measurement and Automation eXplorer). It is related to LabVIEW in that it is also a tool developed by National Instruments (NI). But it does not sound like you have actually touched LabVIEW itself.
As was already stated, *IDN?\n is a typical command that an instrument that follows the SCPI messaging standard. On a Windows system, that is usually the same as "*idn?" + Chr(13) + Chr(10).
As SeanJ pointed out *IDN?\n is not the same as "idn?". Further, make sure that space character in your calling method is visible. Sometimes machines require you to manually type "\r\n" for complete carriage return.
I'd like to find both current running programs (or at least program in the foreground) programmatically - and also key events on OS X.
I found inter-application communication guidelines, but they don't seem to say I can find out what applications are running.
I've found key events, but it seems to imply that the current task in the forefront is the one that gets the key events and only if it doesn't handle them does it go up to event chain. I'd like to programmatically intercept them.
Seems dubious, I know. I'm trying to use key events along with screen captures to try to best learn text on the screen - it's for research.
I'm using swift, but I understand that an obj-c example is pretty helpful since they all use the same libraries.
To get a list of running applications use:
NSWorkspace.sharedWorkspace().runningApplications
You can build a key logger (so to speak) by creating an event monitor (same document you linked, just a different section).
On windows, and with c#, I was able to capture another window's "screen", use that for processing, and then send user input events to that window. (which were generated by the program).
I would like to do the same with objective-c and within Mac OS X. So! Any resources or even a name for what I'm trying to do would be great. It's very frustrating to try and find information on this when the only ways i can think to phrase my searches are too ambiguous.
Thanks!
EDIT: As a specific example, there might be a particular game that I want to make an AI for. In that case I would need to be able to send mouse and keyboard events to the game.
If you're looking to do automated user interface testing, look at Squish, eggPlant, expect and OS X Accessibility. If you're looking to programmatically control another program, use scripting (if you wrote the program to control, add scripting support; otherwise, see what scripting support the program offers), or try Automator.
Programming is at the heart about automating tasks on a computer.
Presumably those tasks would normally be done manually by a human.
Humans use the computer through the keyboard, mouse, and interaction with the console or the window manager. But very few languages have built in functions that provide an interface to these basic computing objects.
A notable exception is autohotkey, an open source language on windows, providing builtin functions that allow the following simple tasks:
* Get Pixel Information
* Get mouse position
* Keyboard macros
* Simulate key strokes
* Simulate mouse click
* Window management
See examples on rosettacode.
There have been various attempts on linux, many of which were stopped without explanation.
One is the inactive tcl library: android. Search google code for android, lang:tcl
I write web server code. No human being interacts with the code. It's simply a lot of complex plug-ins to Apache.
"Humans use the computer through the keyboard, mouse, and interaction with the console or the window manager. "
This is completely false in my case. The "user" sends requests through HTTP. No keyboard, no mouse, no console, no window manager.
The user may be using some kind of fancy GUI, but it doesn't matter to me or my software. All I see are HTTP GET and POST requests. Pure text.
"But very few languages have built in functions that provide an interface to these basic computing objects."
Correct. I have no use for keyboard, mouse, console or window manager.
All personal computing platforms have libraries that will do this.
The problem is that that would require standardizing user interactions over all systems. Java tried this, without a great deal of success. There have been other libraries with more or less success, Qt probably being the most promising one to date.
It's certainly possible to write a language for a single platform that will include all the UI fundamentals. It's also possible to fake it with a GUI and a library. However, there's good reason to want a language that is usable on any major platform, whether or not there's a GUI.
I doubt the premise is true. Java can do all that, except maybe "window management" since I do not know what is meant by this.
I'd be surprised if you can't do it with c#.
If there are many languages that can't do this, I'd guess it is because it is difficult to do it without tying the language to the operating system.
First of all, I think you're asking why the programming languages' standard libraries don't have built-in interfaces to the window manager. The language itself and its libraries are quite distinct.
One big reason is portability. If there's too many specific functions in a programming language's libraries, it will be harder to port it to other systems. For example, I/O, math functions, strings, various data structures and related algorithms, are all generic and can be made to work on virtually any computer.
But things like the window manager, GUI, etc., they are much more specific to certain platforms which is why they are not included in the standard libraries. This is what makes C/C++ so portable.
Tasks performed by computers without any human interface device interaction outnumber those directly actuated by a human by an enormous factor.
Programming languages tries (or at least is currently trying) to be independent with the platform. Example in .net, you have to reference some Win32 api to do some of the stuffs you specified above. Getting it built-in the core programming language model, .net will become too coupled with the OS, thus, creating its Mono counterpart will be too tedious.
Regarding keystrokes, macros and some stuffs, the simplest way I'm doing it right now is true vbscript or in powershell :)
I have recently come across a situation where code is dynamically loading some libraries, wiring them up, then calling what is termed the "application entry point" (one of the libraries must implement IApplication.Run()).
Is this a valid "Appliation entry point"?
I would always have considered the application entry point to be before the loading of the libraries and found the IApplication.Run() being called after a considerable amount of work slightly misleading.
The terms application and system are terms that are so widely and diversely used that you need to agree what they mean upfront with your conversation partner. E.g. sometimes an application is something with a UI, and a system is 'UI-less'. In general it's just a case of you say potato, I say potato.
As for the example you use: that's just what a runtime (e.g. .NET or java) does: loading a set of libraries and calling the application entry point, i.e. the "main" method.
So in your case, the code loading the libraries is doing just the same, and probably calling a method on an interface, you could then consider the loading code to be the runtime for that application. It's just a matter of perspective.
The term "application" can mean whatever you want it to mean. "Application" merely means a collection of resources (libraries, code, images, etc) that work together to help you solve a problem.
So to answer your question, yes, it's a valid use of the term 'application'.
Application on its own means actually nothing. It is often used by people to talk about computer programs that provide some value to the user. A more correct term is application software and this has the following definition:
Application software is a subclass of
computer software that employs the
capabilities of a computer directly
and thoroughly to a task that the user
wishes to perform. This should be
contrasted with system software which
is involved in integrating a
computer's various capabilities, but
typically does not directly apply them
in the performance of tasks that
benefit the user. In this context the
term application refers to both the
application software and its
implementation.
And since application really means application software, and software is any piece of code that performs any kind of task on a computer, I'd say also a library can be an application.
Most terms are of artificial nature anyway. Is a plugin no application? Is the flash plugin of your browser no application? People say no, it's just a plugin. Why? Because it can't run on it's own, it needs to be loaded into a real process. But there is no definition saying only things that "can run on their own" are applications. Same holds true for a library. The core application could just be an empty container and all logic and functionality, even the interaction with the user, could be performed by plugins or libraries, in which case that would be more an application than the empty container that just provides some context for the application to run. Compare this to Java. A Java application can't run on it's own, it must run within a Java Virtual Machine (JVM), does that mean the JVM is the application and the Java Code is just... well what? Isn't the Java code the real application and the JVM just an empty runtime environment that provides nothing to the end user without the loaded Java code?
I think in this context "application entry point" means "the point at which the application (your code) enters the library".
I think probably what you're referring to is the main() function in C/C++ code or WinMain in a Windows app. That is, it's the point where execution is normally started in an app. Your question is pretty broad and vague--for example, which OS are you running this on--but this may be what you're looking for. This might also address the question.
Bear in mind when you're asking questions, details are your friend. People can give you a much better, more informed answer when you provide them with details.
EDIT:
In a broader context consider what has to happen from the standpoint of the OS. When the user specifies that they want to run an app, the OS has to load the app from the hard drive and then when the app is loaded into memory, it has to pass control to some point in the memory blocked occupied by the newly loaded app to continue execution. That would be the "Application Entry Point". When an app is constructed with dynamically linked code the OS has to load all that dynamically linked code in order to get the correct app image into memory. Loading up those shared bits of code does not change the fact that the OS must have a point to which to pass control when the app is loaded into memory.