Speech as an Accelerant – Are Voice Assistants Necessary?
A few Big Tech voice assistants have become household names, but their high-profile has not been accompanied by reliable results and repeated use. Why?
Collin Borns
Aug 15, 2022
1 min read
Speechly offers fast and intuitive development tools for voice user interfaces on the platform most familiar to all developers – command line. You can find the GitHub repository for the tools here
This tutorial shows you how you can prototype and develop voice user interfaces in the command line.
Benefits of command line interface include:
In this tutorial, I’ll show you how you can create and test your first Speechly application on the command line.
If you are using Mac OS, use Homebrew to install speechly with:
$ brew tap speechly/tap
# to get the latest release
$ brew install speechly
After tapping, normal brew updates will include any new versions of speechly.
Scoop is a package manager for Windows. speechly can be installed with scoop with:
$scoop bucket add speechly https://github.com/speechly/scoop-bucket
# to install the latest release
$scoop install speechly
You can update the tool with:
$scoop update
To authenticate against the Speechly API, you’ll need an API token. You can get your API token from the Speechly Dashboard
Sign up (or login, if you are already a Speechly user) and go to Project settings on the top right navigation. Click Create API token and give it a name.
NOTE: After you navigate away from this page, you can’t see the token anymore for security reasons. If you lose your token, you’ll need to create a new one.
Now that we have the required tools installed, let’s create an empty directory for our application. This directory will contain the required configuration files.
$ mkdir my-first-speechly-app && cd my-first-speechly-app
$ md my-first-speechly-app
$ cd my-first-speechly-app
$ speechly config add --name new --apikey <YOUR_API_TOKEN>
Using this command will create a new application called “new” and authenticates by using your API token that we created in the second step of this tutorial.
Our current project doesn’t have any applications, so let’s create the first one. We need to specify the application name with the flag -n
and the language with the flag -l
. Let’s use en-US as the language.
$ speechly create -n home-automation -l en-US
The command replies with the app ID of your newly created application. Copy this string to the clipboard.
NOTE: You can use $ speechly list
to list your applications and to get your app ID.
Because actually configuring a Speechly application is outside the scope of this tutorial, we’ll be using a ready-made home automation template. Let’s download the file.
NOTE: if you are interested in reading more about configuring your application, refer to the Speechly documentation
$ curl https://docs.speechly.com/home-automation.yaml -o home-automation-curl.yaml
As you can see with the $ speechy list
command, our application status is currently STATUS_UNSPECIFIED
as it doesn’t have valid configuration. Let’s fix that by using the configuration file.
$ speechly deploy . -a <YOUR APP ID>
This command uses the YAML file in your current directory. This should be the YAML file we just downloaded.
We can check the current status of the application by using describe
. If you use the -w
flag, you will get real-time information about the status of the deployment.
$ speechly describe -w <YOUR APP ID
After waiting for about 83 seconds, the application has been deployed. Yay! You have configured your first Speechly application by using the command line!
You can verify this by using speechly list
and your application should now have a status STATUS_TRAINED
Now you can test the application by using the Speechly Playground! You can sign in to the Dashboard and see your application in the list.
Try saying something like “Turn off the living room lights” or “Turn on the TV in kitchen”.
For more information on using the Dashboard, see our Quick Start
A few Big Tech voice assistants have become household names, but their high-profile has not been accompanied by reliable results and repeated use. Why?
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Aug 15, 2022
1 min read
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