Lesson 2: Voice and Sound
Last updated
Last updated
The aim of this lesson is to understand how to enable Misty's voice and program her to speak and play audio. By the end of this lesson, you'll be able to understand how to use Misty's speech and audio capabilities in any way you prefer. If you have any questions about Misty's voice and sound capabilities, you can check out Speech and Audio.
Besides physical greetings you can also have Misty greet her human friends with words. Now that you've mastered Misty's movements, let's hear what she has to say. Select the speak block from the 'Speech' tab in Misty Blocks and nest a text block from the 'Text' tab in Basic Blocks. You can identify your text block by the double quotation marks (" "). Try out, writing your first sentence in the text block and select your language. You can also adjust the pitch. The pitch value must be higher than 0, her default is 1.0. What would you like Misty to say?
Once you've found your favorite voice and pitch, let's create a dialogue where Misty plays two robot characters. You can select a different pitch and a different voice in the same language to create more characters. How would you continue this dialogue?
After all that talking it's nice to give Misty an exit out of the dialogue. Let's give her a chance to wave and say goodbye. Try combining the speech blocks and the movement blocks. Connect the blocks in a sequence that you are comfortable with. How would you customize it?
Besides her wonderful voice and speech capabilities, Misty can also be a little vocal about her feelings and has a number of vocal expressions that you can choose from. Select the play audio block in the 'Audio' tab in Misty Blocks to try out some of her vocal expressions. You can explore them in the drop down list or the resource database Audio files. Try out adjusting Misty's volume in a range from 0 to 100.
Misty can also record your voice and other sounds. Connect the recording block from the 'Audio' tab to let Misty record your voice. After you complete recording the audio file will be automatically saved in Misty's memory and you will be able to select it in the drop down list in the play audio block. Remember to keep the file-type .wav.
Do you want Misty to become your personal DJ and play your favorite songs? Then she has just the block you need. Add the upload audio block in the 'Audio' tab and click on the check box, a desktop tab will appear. From your desktop, select your song and press upload/open, then a check mark will appear in your upload audio block and the name of the song in the <filename> field.
Press the run button to let Misty save the file in her memory. Success! Your song is now uploaded.
Important: Before using the uploaded audio file you always need to run the program only with the upload audio block, then refresh the page. After that you will be able to find your song in the play audio file block. If it doesn't show up in the drop down list of the play audio file block try running the upload audio block again.
After you upload the audio you can delete the upload audio block because the audio is already saved.
Note: Remember that you can't upload two contents with the same name, if so, the <filename> will not change and your new block will not upload the audio, because Misty will see that she already has the same name in her memory.
If you only want to play a short segment of your song you can connect a timer block and a stop audio block from the 'Audio' tab. Try out playing the song for only 10 seconds.
Now that Misty can play your favorite song, let's combine speech, movements and audio to teach her how to dance and sing!
You can start by uploading the song, then try out making Misty drive forward, say the name of the song and create choreographed dance. Which dance will you create?
If you are unsure of how you want to build it, you can use the example below of Misty Dancing the Moonwalk.
