Thursday 28 November 2013

Using Howie Chatbot with ROS


Using Howie Chatbot with ROS

This is a bare minimum script to run Howie in ROS it wont use voice recognition yet and uses festival for text to speech. I use Ubuntu 12.4 with ROS groovy and rosbuild not catkin you need to Create a ROS Workspace using the tutorial from here http://wiki.ros.org/ROS/Tutorials/InstallingandConfiguringROSEnvironment
Install festival with your package manager

Install the supplied files in you ROS workspace do a rosmake in the top level of each 
directory. In a terminal window type “roslaunch howie_ros howie.launch” 
Change to the nodes directory and in a terminal window 
run“rosrun howie_ros robbiei.py”
If it all works in the terminal_input window type in “what is you name “ and in the other terminal you will see the response. If it doesn't understand the question make sure you run robbie.py in the nodes directory if festival is configured correctly you will also hear the response.

You can change the name of the bot in robbie.py
This is more of a hack than any thing else

regards
Peter