Robbie finds his voice

One of the big things i have missed since we switched from LEAF to ROS is a voice and being able to talk with the robot. The LEAF program had only a few lines so it became boring very quickly and guests found it hard to strike up a conversation. I found a Python AIML Interpreter hacked it to work with ROS it listens for input on the speech_text topic and publishes the response on the speak_text topic. for testing
i don't use voice recognition just a keyboard it stops the family giveing me funny looks when i say the same thing over and over. Previously i found a blue tooth microphone works well but that is for another day. While the robot is talking it need more visual expression just having the jaw move up and down doesn’t work very well  flashing lights with this head design won't work because of the solid color.
What would look cool are animated eyes via a LCD screen and maybe a RGB LED matrix for the mouth.

While chatting is one function the rest of the time the robot just sits there it may as well be a chair using Markov chains i can generate random sentences  its jiberish but sort of makes sense. I want to have a control loop running that responds to activity and boredom like if nothing has happened for a while do a random move if the robot sees someone utter a Markov chain   if he recognise a face say hello.

Harmonic Drive Update

I found some nylon weed wacker line in the shed so I tried it in the printer and surprise it worked it's very strong and flexible after a few prints I retried the flex spline of the Harmonic drive I had to adjust the perimeter size to get 3 perimeter lines . The print is a bit rough and the teeth are not so well formed but it is flexible and strong so far it's run for 2 hours before the PLA bushes in the wave generator failed (they should have been bearings) the flex spline shows no sign of wear

After a quick repair of the bushes the drive is running again if I can get 10 hours of operation before fail of the flex spline I will add it to a drive base and see how it holds up to regular use