ScarlettSays is a simple voice assistant's playground for the development purposes. It uses the browser speech recognition modules and shows how it can be used for making your own simple voice assistant. You can set various unique snippets through your own logic and expect a feedback from assistant. Assistant can be set by using the simple JavaScript-based syntax.
Just clone that repository and run npm install to install dependency. After that you could start it by using npm start. There is no production mode. Development server is used to save, load, update snippets.
When you start the web-application, by default invocation command is Scarlett. For some reason, it is a really difficult-to-understand name for the computer microphone and you should have the microphone with good sensivity for comfortable using of it. However, you can always change it through config.json in the root directory and pick any prefered name or word.
User Interface has four buttons to provide management of the voice assistant's state.
| Button | Functionality |
|---|---|
 |
Manually invokes voice assistant |
 |
Stops listening the user microphone and do nothing |
 |
Mutes voice assistant and respond only as a message on the screen |
 |
Opens snippets' management section |
The new snippet can be created through the snippets' management section. It has the two modes - Snippets Library to see, edit, remove the existing snippets and Register Snippet to create a new one.
To register the new snippet you should create a JavaScript Object with property input and method output where output should return string which will be used as voice assistant's feedback.
The simplest example is the snippet about the current time.
SCARLETT.registerSnippet({
input: 'what time is now?',
output: () => {
const date = new Date();
return `${date.getHours()} hours ${date.getMinutes()} minutes`
},
})The property input is a string to trigger snippet. You can pass a variable by adding * before the keyword and, for example, input as tell me about *search can be triggered by saying tell me about cats, tell me about dogs, etc.
There is no restrictions about complexity for the method output if it returns the valid string. You can call external API with GET and POST methods to retrieve information by using SCARLETT.httpGet and SCARLETT.httpPost where httpGet and httpPost are wrappers on AngularJS service's methods $http.get and $http.post. Documentation about the methods can be found here.
For example, the next example shows how to get the data from Wikipedia, format it by taking only the first sentences and return to the voice assistant.
SCARLETT.registerSnippet({
input: 'tell me about *search',
output: (search) => SCARLETT.httpGet(`https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=search&srsearch=${search}&utf8=&format=json&origin=*`)
.then(response => {
const id = response.data.query.search[0].pageid;
return SCARLETT.httpGet(`https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&format=json&pageids=${id}&prop=extracts&exintro&explaintext&origin=*`)
.then(response => {
const extraction = response.data.query.pages[id].extract;
const snippet = extraction.substring(0, 1000).split('. ').slice(0, -1).join('. ') + '.';
return snippet;
})
})
})