Bot Contest

You probably got the same email as I did, but in case you didn't.....they provided a physical address to send 'stand-alone entries' to. (That might not be the sort of thing they meant, but you may want to risk it anyway.) If they didn't actually send you that, let me know and I'll shoot a copy in your general direction.

Really, Chris? You couldnt set it up so that it posts to a javascript page that reads it and outputs.. hmm.. Yes, that should work, using writeln(''); shouldnt it? How is the interface set up currently?

What does Mercury in Retrograde mean for us?

It affects issues related to communication.....and travel. (I should have known! ) It even affects mail and other deliveries, which might explain the ridiculous difficulties in you receiving your cookies and me receiving my new motherboard combo.

Mercury retrograde is not a good time to begin new projects unless you absolutely have to. It IS a good time to redo, rework, remodel, re-just about anything. If you begin something right now, there will be re-whatever to do later anyway.

Also explains the crap we've had with the mail around here lately. Someone discovered some white powder that was probably totally innocuous in a letter, and became convinced it was anthrax, so the post office shut down for a few days. Just some dork wanting his 15 minutes of fame. I mean who the hell would anthrax a shithole town in the middle of nowhere?

How long is this crap gonna last anyway? It could very well fuck up the readings we need to do, but we can't just not do them so we're gonna hafta deal with it.

It goes direct (normal) again on October 6, I think. Just a few days before Loebner finals.

I hope that Mercury retrograde thing doesn't have effect. Not just for the Loebner. I'm changing job soon!

My ex-girlfriend was heavily into astrology, and had a habit of always bringing up Mercury being in retrograde when it happened, which is usually when crap began to take place.

The crap I sing about in the song I mentioned is our breaking up, of course. In the middle section, you can hear a voice-bot reading part of one of her emails to me which talked about Mercury being in retrograde... hence the title.

Hey, that's a pretty cool song. And the computer voice sounds very real. What program is doing that?

Trying to get a job has been total failure so far. How long has this retrograde been going on?

What retrograde? *clueless stare*

I went to Wal-mart today and saw they had the 2003 Guinness book of World Records for sale and sure enough in the computer section Alice by Dr. Wallace was listed as having the most human like program. That would be a nice title to claim to this years Loebner winner.

Chris

Thanks, prof. The voice came off of a website I found while doing a search for computer voices. I found a lot of sites, but only one that sounded even remotely natural. I'll try to dig up the URL again, since my bookmark was lost when I reinstalled my system.

Of course I had to jump through a lot of hoops to get it just right, including intentionally misspelling text input, and chopping up and pasting phrases in my audio software until it sounded just so. Softening the sound with heavy EQ, and blending it back in the mix made it even more human sounding.

Yeah, gotta love what you have to do with some of those
BTW I'm making my voice into a speech file for the Microsoft TTS engine