This is a submission for DEV's Summer Bug Smash: Smash Stories powered by Sentry.
Overview
Sometimes we discover our limitations through a series of failures. We don’t understand why something is not working, despite having tried multiple improvements and optimizations. My desktop pet, Catbot, is no exception. I had issues with Catbot cutting me off or not letting me finish before I started talking. It would constantly tell me that I was calling it cat bought and not Catbot. This was an actual pain in the rear. Catbot would spend a lot of time explaining this to me.
I was able to tweak the listening window, so that Catbot would stop listening after a 1.5 second pause. This gives me enough time to finish my sentence, given my natural pauses and end of sentences. Controlling the pause gap helped tremendously. Going from .5 seconds to 1.5 seconds made all the difference in the world.
After adding a better layer of control to Catbot’s listening skills, I still had difficulties using Catbot’s name. It thought I was saying “Catfight”, “Cat bought”, and even “Lawrence” one time. This will seem brief to the reader but it was only after multiple sessions of frustration that I came to the realization that perhaps my webcam mic was not a great listening tool for Catbot - as it picks up all sounds in the room. After some quick googling, I was very convinced that a better mic would help. I popped on my fancy cat ear headset and not to my surprise, Catbot could understand what I was saying much better. We need to make sure we are using the best hardware for the job. My headset mic is a close range Omni directional mic that does a good job leaving out all the background noise.
