Kalliope acting as a reminder

Introduction

Yesterday, I wanted to add a feature to Kalliope (my always-on voice controlled personal assistant) : the ability to reminds me of something later on. I have a very selective memory and forget to do a lot of stuff, so when I think about something important, I can gently ask Kalliope to reminds me to do it (:

The main use case

The primary use case (there are other things I’d like to do, see the last paragraph about the todolist) is:

Be able to ask Kalliope to reminds me of something in X minutes.

This translate into these actions:

• A neuron with an order like “remind me in 10 minutes to leave for my appointment”
• Launching a command that will sleep for 10minutes
• After the delay, the command should make kalliope remind me of my appointment

I didn’t / couldn’t do a neuron, seeing the dependencies with languages and a need for an async script (kalliope needs to be able to answer commands in the meantime), a neuron was too complex.

My solution

I ended up creating:

• A synapse that would just fire a python script that would do all the work.

  • The order looks like “remind me {{query}}”.
  • The neuron used is the community shell neuron by sending the query to the script.

• A python script that receive the full query (including time to wait and the “thing” to remember

  • The script fire an “at” command to program the wake up
  • The command started by “at” will leverage Kalliope API to tell me what to remember.

• A new neuron to make kalliope say dynamic text.

The repeat neuron

The idea of this neuron is really simple: You send it arguments, and it will send them back as a return value to be used in template or say_template command.

As you can see on the sample brain file, you can do things like “say hello to {{name}}” or what not :).

To install the module, as usual:

        kalliope install --git-url https://github.com/bacardi55/kalliope-repeat.git

Then you can configure your brain as usual.

On synapse I created was this one:

          - name: "Repeat-via-api"
            signals:
              - order: "api-repeat-cmd {{ query }}"
            neurons:
              - repeat:
                  args:
                    - query
                  say_template:
                    - "{{ query }}"

The idea of this one is just to repeat what is in query when an order is sent that starts with “api-repeat-cmd”. It’s easy enough as I’m sure i will never pronounce a thing like this.

So basically, any API call that will POST an order starting like this will make Kalliope read the text sent.

For example,

        curl -i --user admin:secret -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST -d '{"order":"api-repeat-cmd Hello sir, how are you ?"}' http://kalliope:5000/order/

This command will make Kalliope say “Hello sir, how are you”.