Building a Home AI, Part 5: Fracted dates

If you want occupation for an hour, drink. If you want occupation for a day, read. If you want occupation for a month, marry. If you want occupation for a lifetime, teach an AI to recognize every combination of dates and times in the English language. —Ancient Chinese Proverb, trans. Roxton. March...

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Caps Off

All quiet here, I know. The new job is pretty time consuming, and most of what I'm writing for it falls under the IP clause in my contract and so can't be shared. However, I've been going through my code libraries and am trying to get all the non-protected things up on GitHub. A very small and mostly useless tool, then: an app that automatically turns off Caps Lock whenever you lock your PC. Useful...

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Building a Home AI, Part 4: Calendars

Another month, another update. That up above is the very basic Mervyn UI. User input is shown on the right; Mervyn's response is on the left. The speech recognition is still push-to-talk as I haven't got keyword spotting worked out yet (I'm hoping to start looking seriously at hardware in the next...

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Building a Home AI, Part 3: The basics

A month in to my New Year's resolution, it's probably time to report on my progress so far. After all, Zuck has. One month in, I have an application that resembles nothing so much as an extremely rudimentary chatbot. Mervyn can tell the time on request, and learn a few facts about you... and that's about it. Not terribly exciting, but the foundations have now been laid for more interesting things....

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Building a Home AI, Part 2: Specifications

Having decided to build a cyber-valet, it's probably a good idea to think about what such an assistant would be - which, in the case of something that is entirely servile, is probably synonymous with what it does. Zuck's Facebook post mentions a few things: Controlling the lights and temperature in his house Watching his daughter’s room for hazards Admitting guests based on facial recognition. The...

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Building a home AI: Introduction

Another year, another press release from Mark Zuckerberg's PR team, this time listing his New Year's resolutions. One of these is to build "a simple AI" to run his home and help with his work, à la Jarvis from Iron Man. Being fantastically lazy myself, I have often wished for such an assistant, digital or otherwise, and I thought that a pleasant project for this year might be to attempt its creation,...

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C#: Making a Windows Forms application that minimizes to the notification area

Below is a quick guide to making a C# Windows Forms application minimize to the notification area instead of the taskbar. This is something I find I have to do from time to time, mostly for little utilities that I want to run in the background without taking up prime screen spac...

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