NIMBUS: The CSAI Voice Assistant

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The "Cal Poly Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence" club is designing a voice assistant to provide the Cal Poly Computer Science department with relevant information about the department and university. The intent is for users to ask for information about the department such as professor's office hours & expertise, course prerequisites, etc. Users can also ask the assistant for general information about the university such as the history, mascott, and more. Our project team was awarded the "Google Cloud Platform Educational Grant" to fund the usage of server hosting, database management, and speech application needs.

Project Video

Demo Video

Leads

Chidi Ewenike - Project Lead

Miles Aikens - Software/Cloud Infrastructure Lead

Jason Ku - Software/Test Lead

Michael Fekadu - Data Lead

John Waidhofer - Application Development Lead

Richa Gadgil - Natural Language Processing Lead

Cameron Toy - Software Lead

Tyler Herzog - Hardware Lead

Austin Silveria - Information Infrastructure Lead

Active Developers:

Jay Ahn

Steven Bradley

Jacob Burghgraef

Tyler Campanile

Ben Dahlgren

Daniel DeFoe

Allen Deng

Kalen Goo

Karshin Gupta

Yale Hone

Eden Hoover

Adam Lee

Max Mohammadi

Taylor Nguyen

Viet Nguyen

Adam Perlin

Sai Pamidi

Storm Randolph

Kush Upadhyay

Henry Yin

Faculty Advisors

Dr. Fooad Khosmood - Natural Language Processing/Machine Learning

Dr. Wayne Pilkington - Audio Processing

Dr. Franz Kurfess - Machine Learning

Spring 2019: Wake Word

Wake Word Phase Developers: Kalen Goo, Tyler Herzog, Max Mohammadi, Brett Nelson, Viet Nguyen, Kevin Nottberg, Austin Silveria, Cameron Toy, John Waidhofer

The CSAI Voice Assistant Project Team is currently designing the wake-word solution for the voice assistant. This is to create a speech recognition application layer for the assistant which will activate our voice assistant by saying "Nimbus". We have collected wake word audio data on the name of the voice assistant "Nimbus" and non wake word which would result in false activations. With this audio data, we extract MFCCs as input features to feed the Gated Recurrent Unit. We are currently building and optimizing our Gated Recurrent Unit model and designing infrastructure to implement our current model.

Summer 2019: Data Acquisition/Optimization

Data Acquisition/Optimization Phase Developers: Kalen Goo, Tyler Herzog, Max Mohammadi, Brett Nelson, Viet Nguyen, Austin Silveria, Cameron Toy

Natural Language Processing data acquisition and optimization of the current wake word solution. We are currently developing data collection applications for iOS, Android, and Web for members to access. These applications will allow for both wake-word and NLP intent collection and validation.

Fall 2019: Natural Language Processing Domain-Specific Implementation

Natural Language Processing Phase Developers: Jacob Burghgraef , Tyler Campanile, Daniel DeFoe, Allen Deng, Kalen Goo, Yale Hone, Max Mohammadi, Viet Nguyen, Kevin Nottberg, Sai Pamidi ,Adam Perlin, Austin Silveria

Applying the NLP layer and optimizing to make accurate queries for accurate predictions. Also scripting a site scraping program to obtain necessary information and adding such information to a look-up table for future access.

Winter 2020: Infrastructure - Hardware/Mobile Application Design

Finalzing the NLP layer and implementing Google Cloud Platform Speech-To-Text and Text-To-Speech. The hardware and mobile application design will occur to complete the project for the end-to-end product.

Project Progress

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