About
«E.L.I.Z.A. Talking» is a project to explore the capabilities of client-side speech I/O in modern browsers.
The project features Joseph Weizenbaum’s famous ELIZA program, which demoed the thrills of a natural language conversation with a computer for the very first time. Joseph Weizenbaum (1923–2008) was an important pioneer in computer technologies and became later well known for his critique of technological progress. His program is presented here in the famous VT100 terminal, which was introduced in 1978 and became soon a universal standard. It provided many users their first exposure to interactive computing — an experience that might not have been far from what a real chat with a computer would mean today.
All scripts by Norbert Landsteiner, mass:werk – media environments, www.masswerk.at.
This page and embedded images © 2013 Norbert Landsteiner, mass:werk – media environments.
Details
Ingredients
• «meSpeak.js» Text-To-Speech library based on eSpeak – <www.masswerk.at/mespeak>
• «elizabot.js» configurable port of ELIZA to JavaScript – <www.masswerk.at/elizabot>
• «termlib.js» OO terminal interface element – <www.masswerk.at/termlib>
• «VT323» font by Peter Hull, provided by Google Fonts – <www.google.com/fonts>
• JavaScript, html5, CSS, hand-crafted bytes & pixels
Text to Speech
Speech synthesis is implemented as a pure client-side solution: «meSpeak.js» is a JavaScript-version of eSpeak, an open source TTS-application for the *NIX-platform. «meSpeak.js» builds on the «speak.js» project, which ported eSpeak from C to JavaScript using the Emscripten cross-compiler. It adds enhanced browser-compatibilty and a modular architecture for languages and voices.
«meSpeak.js» is compatible with any browser providing either support for the Web Audio API or the HTML5-audio-element and the compatibility to play back wav-files. (This applies to current versions of all major desktop browsers, but one from a specific vendor.)
Note: You may access an extended voice setup anywhere in a conversation by entering the Universal Expert Token [?].
Speech to Text
Voice recognition is a topic much too complex to be covered by client-side solution
