Week 1: Introduction & meeting our team

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Welcome to our development blog!

We are team 39 (2020) and in the coming weeks, we will be detailing our progress in completing our COMP0016 group project (“AskBob – designing a library of open-source, federated and localised Alexa-like devices”) in partnership with IBM and the NHS here.

Meeting the team

When we received our brief on Thursday, we immediately made contact with each other and created a new team on Microsoft Teams. We then held a team meeting to introduce ourselves to each other and start discussing the project.

The members of the team at the outset are the following:

I created fresh Trello and Miro setups to organise our project, as well as a GitHub organisation for the project. We also contacted our clients requesting interviews with them to help us clarify the scope and requirements of our projecct.

The project brief

The initial brief we received from our clients at IBM and in the NHS is the following:

We are looking for open locally buildable designs for open-source “in-house Alexa”-style development with Watson/deepspeech, which can operate on low power devices such as a Raspberry Pi.

Several versions should be designed experimentally: one for care homes and for carers, interfacing voice into the carercare platform; one for children at home (“read a story to me”); one for retail (“how do I find chocolates in Tescos?”); and one for NHS environments (“how do I get to radiotherapy?”).

All versions should perform processing locally without internet access and an API should be published to allow for the easy injection of additional open-source “skills” by USB stick. Translated speech output in different languages should also be considered.

Next steps

We will be looking to gather further details from our clients when they respond in order to draft a MoSCoW list of requirements. Once that has been completed, we will start examining our project’s human-computer interaction considerations.