PixelPet provides adorable, animated WebVR pets through A-Frame that can chat with their owner and respond to commands. It integrates the Watson Assistant and Tone Analyzer APIs and maintains custom entities and context variables. This enables emotionally responsive conversations between the user and their PixelPet, as well as providing different personality options and the ability for the pet to learn about its owner. In addition to accepting text input, PixelPet uses the Web Speech API to allow users to talk to their pets directly.
The inspiration behind this app is the idea that, despite being surrounded by increasingly powerful and intelligent virtual assistants, comparatively little has been done to make these assistants companionable. They provide a great deal of logistical support to their users, but next to no emotional support. As machine learning continues to improve, it would be ideal if the virtual personalities in our lives were not only useful, but likeable and empathetic.
Everything you need can be acquired by running npm install
PixelPet uses the following API's and libraries:
You will need a PostgreSQL database, which you can create with createdb pixel-pet
There is also a seed script you can run with npm run seed
npm run start:dev will run Webpack and start the server listening on localhost:8080 and will watch the project for changes.
Here are some fun things to try with your PixelPet:
At this time, PixelPet's speech-to-text depends on the Web Speech API, which is currently only supported by Chrome.